Designing a Wide Angle Beam-splitting Reflective Metasurface for Mitigating Urban Wireless Communication Disruptions

Recently, the use of higher frequencies in next-generation wireless communication environments, such as 5G and 6G, has significantly improved the speed of data transfer. However, in a dense urban area, high-frequency signals suffer a severe shadowing and fading due to many obstacles. In this paper, we propose a reflective electromagnetic-wave-splitting metasurface to solve these problems. The designed metasurface operates at 5.8 GHz which is a frequency commonly used in the ISM band for urban applications, splitting incident waves under normal incidence into ±58° while suppressing specular reflection significantly, and achieves a wider beam-splitting angle compared to the previous studies. By reducing the disruptions caused by obstacles, the proposed reflective metasurface is expected to improve the signal fidelity of the wireless communication system and mitigate the signal disruption.