From the smart entities design to the smart EM planning and optimization: A journey towards the physical implementation of the metaverse

Brief Summary: “Imagine a virtual world where billions of people live, work, shop, learn and interact with each other, all from the comfort of their couches in the physical world. In this world, the computer screens we use today to connect to a worldwide web of information have become portals to a 3D virtual realm that's palpable, like real life, only bigger and better. Digital facsimiles of ourselves, or avatars, move freely from one experience to another, taking our identities and our money with us.” [L. Tucci] This is known as the metaverse, which does not exist today, but it can be reality in a close future whether the envisaged advances in the technology realm will come true. For instance, the metaverse implementation is strongly related to the ubiquitous availability of considerable computational resources and huge information flows from content generators to users. From the physical-layer viewpoint, it means to have available a wired/wireless infrastructure well beyond the standard one based on the use of base-stations (BTSs) and terminals. As a matter of fact, while higher frequency bands are mandatory for improving the users' experience and QoS, the densification of BTSs is not a suitable solution because of the direct as well as the indirect costs. Moreover, metaverseenabling wireless architectures should be "smart" and simple. Through an innovative design, wireless networks need to transform from centralized to distributed being simple and integrated instead heavy-duty and incremental, while moving from terrestrial to ubiquitous access. This is the background picture of the Smart EM Environment (SEME) paradigm for new generation wireless architectures. Moving from a vision of the propagation environment as a "stone guest" in a wireless communication, the SEME approach considers the propagation channel as a key-actor in fitting the technological requirements of a sustainable and reliable implementation of the metaverse. Accordingly, not-only the obstacles and objects are taken into account and opportunistically exploited to improve the QoS and the user-experience (UE), but also they are "improved" by adding smart entities such as smart devices (e.g., EM skins [EMSs], reconfigurable intelligent surfaces [RISs], smart repeaters, and IAB nodes) and smart objects (e.g., WAIM and metaantennas or artificial scatterers). This talk will review recent trends and advances in the build in of the SEME towards an effective and out-of-the-labs implementation/deployment of the metaverse.