Concurrent mmWave Communication and Orientation Tracking With Anisotropic Metasurfaces

The real-time knowledge of mmWave device orientation offers dual benefits for wireless networks and Internet of Things (IoT) applications: it enhances communication and localization performance through link diagnosis, and it enables context inference with asset and wearable tracking. This paper presents MetaPol, a novel system architecture that augments commodity mmWave access points (APs) with a carefully designed ultra-low-cost anisotropic metasurface to non-invasively extract the orientation of client devices, without hindering data reception or modifying hardware. MetaPol leverages the polarization of transmitted electromagnetic (EM) waves as an accurate indicator of the orientation of linearly polarized antenna arrays, prevalent in commercial mmWave mobile and IoT devices. Yet, polarization sensing is rarely supported by commodity APs due to the need for two orthogonally polarized antenna arrays to capture the incident electric field. Instead, MetaPol creates virtual polarization channels to characterize impinging electric fields, through the conversions of wave polarization on the fly as it interacts with the metasurface. To design MetaPol, we model and exploit the properties of a unique anisotropic metamaterial based on C-shaped split-ring resonators. We discover that, when grouped in certain configurations, these meta-elements can convert the incident polarization in a deterministic way. We show that three polarization channels are sufficient for unambiguous orientation sensing, and we provide a corresponding three-shot non-coherent protocol that extracts user orientation by comparing the power received from distinct surface areas. Through extensive over-the-air experiments with more than 1000 measurements in the mmWave band, we demonstrate that MetaPol achieves a mean error of 2.6° across practical settings with negligible compromise to the underlying data communication link.