Eliminating Blind Spots from Wireless Network by Metasurface: A Blind Approach
Provides a practical, plug-and-play solution for eliminating wireless dead zones in indoor environments, bypassing the high overhead of channel estimation.
RFZero eliminates wireless blind spots using metasurfaces without channel estimation, achieving complete blind spot removal in a 100 m² indoor area with two 1.5m×0.9m metasurfaces.
Deploying metasurfaces (MTSs) to eliminate wireless blind spots requires jointly determining the physical placement of MTSs and the meta-atom phase shifts. Existing methods typically rely on explicit channel estimation, which incurs prohibitive overhead and is often intractable in real-world networks. To sidestep this bottleneck, we propose RFZero, a channel-state-information (CSI)-free deployment paradigm. Instead of estimating channels, RFZero extracts macro-environmental features from visual photos to guide MTS placement, and leverages reference signal received power (RSRP) feedback for dynamic phase-shift optimization. Most importantly, RFZero operates independently of base stations, thereby enabling seamless plug-and-play implementation. Real-world field tests confirm that RFZero completely eliminates all blind spots in a $100\text{ m}^2$ indoor area using just a pair of $1.5\text{ m}\times 0.9\text{ m}$ MTSs.