Application of wireless technologies in the smart home is dealt with by pointing out advantages and limitations of available approaches for the solution of heterogeneous and coexisting problems related to the distributed monitoring of the home and the inhabitants. Some hot challenges facing the exploitation of noninvasive wireless devices for user behavior monitoring are then addressed and the application fields of smart power management and elderly people monitoring are chosen as representative cases where the estimation of user activities improves the potential of location-aware services in the smart home. The problem of user localization is considered with great care to minimize the invasiveness of the monitoring system. Wireless architectures are reviewed and discussed as flexible and transparent tools toward the paradigm of a totally automatic/autonomic environment. With respect to available state-of-the-art solutions, our proposed architecture is based also on existing wireless devices and exploits, in an opportunistic way, the characteristics of wireless signals to estimate the presence, the movements, and the behaviors of inhabitants, reducing the system complexity and costs. Selected and representative examples from real implementations are presented to give some insight on state-of-the-art solutions also envisaging possible future trends.

The design of a smart electromagnetic (EM) environment for next-generation wireless communication systems is addressed in this work. The proposed approach aims at synthesizing a desired EM field distribution over a target region, where the receiving terminals are located, through the opportunistic exploitation of the complex scattering interactions between the EM field generated by a reconfigurable primary source and the objects/scatterers present in the environment, which behave as application-driven passive metastructures. The effectiveness and the potentialities of the proposed design methodology are assessed with a proof-of-concept numerical result obtained by means of advanced and reliable simulation tools.

The design of isophoric phased arrays composed of two-sized square-shaped tiles that fully cover rectangular apertures is dealt with. The number and the positions of the tiles within the array aperture are optimized to fit desired specifications on the power pattern features. Towards this end, starting from the derivation of theoretical conditions for the complete tileability of the aperture, an ad-hoc coding of the admissible arrangements, which implies a drastic reduction of the cardinality of the solution space, and their compact representation with a graph are exploited to profitably apply an effective optimizer based on an integer-coded Genetic Algorithm. A set of representative numerical examples, concerned with state-of-the-art benchmark problems, is reported and discussed to give some insights on the effectiveness of both the proposed tiled architectures and the synthesis strategy.

The modular design of planar phased array antennas with hexagonal apertures is addressed by means of innovative diamond-shaped tiling techniques. Both tiling configuration and sub-array coefficients are optimized to fit user-defined powermask constraints on the radiation pattern. Towards this end, suitable surface-tiling mathematical theorems are customized to the problem at hand to guarantee optimal performance in case of low/medium-size arrays, while the computationally-hard tiling of large arrays is yielded thanks to an effective integer-coded GA-based exploration of the arising high-cardinality solution spaces. By considering ideal as well as real array models, a set of representative benchmark problems is dealt with to assess the effectiveness of the proposed architectures and tiling strategies. Moreover, comparisons with alternative tiling architectures are also performed to show to the interested readers the advantages and the potentialities of the diamond sub-arraying of hexagonal apertures.

The solution of highly nonlinear inverse scattering problems is addressed. An innovative multiresolution microwave imaging technique, which leverages on the profitable integration of the contraction integral equation for inversion (CIE-I) and the iterative multiscaling approach (IMSA), is proposed. Thanks to the joint exploitation of the features of the CIE-I formulation and the IMSA, the arising IMSA-CIE-I inversion technique provides faithful reconstructions of complex-shaped strong scatterers with enhanced resolution and computational efficiency with respect to the state-of-the-art competitive alternatives. Numerical and experimental test cases verify the effectiveness and limitations of the proposed method.