Wavefront Shaping for Wireless Communications in Complex Media: From Time Reversal to Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are gaining huge momentum in the field of wireless communications due to the paradigm shift that they bring. Indeed, they allow making any environment electromagnetically smart and dynamically reconfigurable for more efficient and greener wireless communications. As physicists, we proposed to use electronically tunable metasurfaces to shape the electromagnetic waves carrying our wireless communications in reflection almost ten years ago, inspired by some works that we and colleagues did in the field of wave control in complex media. In this article, we review the seminal works that led us to propose this concept, starting from the original one that is time reversal. Then, we propose a physicist’s point of view of RISs using a comparison with phase conjugation. Finally, we highlight what we think are their limitations, relying on both our knowledge of wave control and our study of them over a decade.