Recently reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has attracted great attention because it can create a smart wireless environment. Hence it can enhance the capacity and coverage of the wireless network significantly. A thorough review of RISs has been presented in this paper focusing on the hardware aspect of the RIS. Beyond-5G/6G communication will have a smart propagation environment, where RIS can be used for such communications. RIS consists of various small unit cells. The unit cells should have some tunning mechanism so that the incoming waves can be reflected or transmitted in the desired direction. It is possible to tune the impedance of the unit cells using PIN diodes, varactor didoes, microelectromechanical (MEMS), thermal, and other ways. In this paper, initially, the background of RIS has been discussed where RIS is going to play a significant role in beyond-5G/6G communications. We have also added the theoretical background of RIS and motivations to writing this paper. After that several published papers in the literature have been presented so that the readers can get an overall idea about the RIS and its hardware. Hence, this paper will be very useful for practitioner engineers and researchers. RISs have been presented in various tables and various parameters have been presented. We have discussed challenges and solutions for the hardware of the RIS design. We have also discussed potential research and research gap that can be explored in the future. Lastly, we have added a conclusion for this review paper.

With the advancement of technology, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are being used in numerous applications. However, the illegal use of UAVs, such as in terrorism and spycams, has also increased, which has led to active research on anti-drone methods. Various anti-drone methods have been proposed over time; however, the most representative method is to apply intentional electromagnetic interference to drones, especially to their sensor modules. In this paper, we review various studies on the effect of intentional electromagnetic interference (IEMI) on the sensor modules. Various studies on IEMI sources are reviewed and classified on the basis of the power level, information needed, and frequency. To demonstrate the application of drone-sensor modules, major sensor modules used in drones are briefly introduced, and the setup and results of the IEMI experiment performed on them are described. Finally, we discuss the effectiveness and limitations of the proposed methods and present perspectives for further research necessary for the actual application of anti-drone technology.

A three‐dimensional frequency selective surface (3D‐FSS) that provides stability for an angle of incidence and miniaturised unit cell size is presented. The proposed 3D‐FSS is easy to fabricate and is implemented using via holes in a multilayer printed circuit board structure. Frequency transmission characteristics for different angles of both TE and TM polarisations are presented through simulations. The proposed structure was fabricated so as to verify the simulation results. The comparisons between the simulation and the measured results show good agreement. The results also show that the proposed 3D‐FSS can provide better frequency stability for different incidence angles and polarisations as well as miniaturised unit cell size.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are programmable metasurface structures that can control the propagation of electromagnetic waves by changing the electrical and magnetic properties of the surface. They can be used to intelligently reconfigure the wireless environment to improve the capacity and coverage of wireless networks. In recent years, numerous theoretical innovations and prototype tests have demonstrated that the RIS has the advantages of low cost, low power consumption, and easy deployment, and creates many potential opportunities and broad application prospects in 5G and future 6G networks. In this paper, starting from the technological development of RISs, we discussed the technical issues of RISs. The standardization of RISs, types of RISs according to operation modes, channel modeling, considerations for hardware implementation, differences from existing communication modules and the need for active RIS implementation, noise and power characteristics to ensure the efficiency of RISs, and performance parameters of RISs and field test results of RISs in indoor and outdoor environments were reviewed. By resolving the current technical issues of RISs, it is expected that RISs will be successfully used for B5G/6G communication through commercialization.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely applied in battlefield surveillance, where the data collection (e.g. target tracking or contention zone observation) employed by local sensor nodes needs to send to military bases for tactical decisions. Since data transmissions are susceptible to malicious attacks, jammers of adversaries can successfully block their victim’s communications by transmitting interfering signals to legitimate transmissions. Nowadays, owing to the ability to reconfigure the wireless propagation medium, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is regarded as an effective tool to enhance transmission performance, especially in the jamming context. This paper considers the anti-jamming communication tactical scenario of a solar-powered RIS network, in which the RIS is used to improve the uplink transmission performance between a wireless device (WD) and a base station (BS). We investigate the long-term anti-jamming communications of the WD powered by a solar energy harvester. Our objective is to jointly assign the optimal amount of transmission energy and the RIS phase shifts to maximize the data rate of the system in the long run. To this end, we formulate an anti-jamming communication optimization problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) framework and then design a deep Q network (DQN)-based algorithm to generate an optimal policy. As a result, the optimal resource allocation is achieved through trial-and-error interactions with environment by observing the predefined rewards and the network state transition. The Python simulation results conducted by averaging 10 ⁴ time slots show that the proposed algorithm is not only able to learn from environment, but also yields better performance than baseline schemes under network changes. Moreover, the performance of RIS communication schemes is verified to be superior to that of without-RIS communication schemes in the jamming context.

This paper proposes a reconfigurable unit cell for a transmitarray operating at the X band. The unit cell consists of an active patch, a passive patch, and a phase shifter. The active patch has two PIN diodes that change the phase of 180° of the transmitted waves. The passive and active patches both have circular slots to enhance the bandwidth of the transmitted wave. We also propose a new type of experimental characterization technique to measure the performance of the unit cells at the X band without fabricating the entire transmitarray. Instead of a 1 unit cell as described in the literature, we propose 2 × 2 unit cells to measure the performance of unit cells using the X band waveguide. The waveguide consists of a WR-90 section and a rectangular to square waveguide transition section that can be fit to our proposed structure. A good agreement between simulated and measured results was found.