ECCS-EPSRC: Towards Quantum-assisted Reconfigurable Indoor Wireless Environments

Indoor scenario has emerged as one of the most congested, contested, and competitive wireless environments. With the need of resilient Internet of Everything (IoE) and Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) infrastructures, we expect to connect thousands of devices within a confined indoor environment, interfering to each other and contending for limited electromagnetic spectrum. While the growing demand for data traffic meets confined space and congested spectrum, it creates a clear and
present technical challenge, and opportunities for innovation. The research objective of this proposal is to investigate new fundamental communication models and schemes, which dynamically program and customize indoor wireless propagation environments for enhanced wireless communication. This objective is attained by integrating the physics of wave-chaotic dynamics, the mathematics of random matrix theory, the engineering of reconfigurable electromagnetic surfaces, and the computing power of adiabatic quantum annealer. The proposed work consists of three components: (1) rigorous mathematical model for the statistical analysis of wave physics in complex confined indoor environment; (2) the configuration and control of wave chaos using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces; (3) Quantum-enabled, ultra-fast large-scale optimization of reconfigurable intelligent surface configuration.