  Metasurfaces have drawn significant attentions due to their superior
capability in tailoring electromagnetic waves with a wide frequency range, from
microwave to visible light. Recently, programmable metasurfaces have
demonstrated the ability of manipulating the amplitude or phase of
electromagnetic waves in a programmable manner in real time, which renders them
especially appealing in the applications of wireless communications. To
practically demonstrate the feasibility of programmable metasurfaces in future
communication systems, in this paper, we design and realize a novel
metasurface-based wireless communication system. By exploiting the dynamically
controllable property of programmable metasurface, we firstly introduce the
fundamental principle of the metasurface-based wireless communication system
design. We then present the design, implementation and experimental evaluation
of the proposed metasurface-based wireless communication system with a
prototype, which realizes single carrier quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK)
transmission over the air. In the developed prototype, the phase of the
reflected electromagnetic wave of programmable metasurface is directly
manipulated in real time according to the baseband control signal, which
achieves 2.048 Mbps data transfer rate with video streaming transmission over
the air. Experimental result is provided to compare the performance of the
proposed metasurface-based architecture against the conventional one. With the
slight increase of the transmit power by 5 dB, the same bit error rate (BER)
performance can be achieved as the conventional system in the absence of
channel coding. Such a result is encouraging considering that the
metasurface-based system has the advantages of low hardware cost and simple
structure, thus leading to a promising new architecture for wireless
communications.
