From Advanced Cloaking Metasurfaces to a New Generation of Intelligent Antennas

In this work, we review our recent research on advanced cloaking metasurfaces used to cover monopole antennas. Cloaking devices based on passive metasurfaces have demonstrated a dramatic enhancement of the antenna functionalities, thanks to the additional the degrees of freedom available in the design. Integrating electronic circuits and enabling time modulation in cloaking metasurfaces can further lead to more advanced functionalities, making the covered antennas ever more intelligent. In this framework, our vision is to extensively use reconfigurable metasurfaces to make the antennas cognitive and adaptive, enabling sensing capabilities of the surrounding electromagnetic environment, and dynamic changing of their properties (e.g. operation frequency, visibility/invisibility, polarization, radiation pattern shape, power level, etc.) accordingly.