Wireless 2.0: Towards an Intelligent Radio Environment Empowered by Reconfigurable Meta-Surfaces and Artificial Intelligence

We introduce "Wireless 2.0": The future generation of wireless communication networks, where the radio environment becomes controllable, programmable, and intelligent by leveraging the emerging technologies of reconfigurable metasurfaces and artificial intelligence (AI). This paper, in particular, puts the emphasis on AI-based computational methods and commence with an overview of the concept of intelligent radio environments based on reconfigurable meta-surfaces. Later we elaborate on data management aspects, the requirements of supervised learning by examples, and the paradigm of reinforcement learning (RL) to learn by acting. Finally, we highlight numerous open challenges and research directions.