Softly, Deftly, Scrolls Unfurl Their Splendor: Rolling Flexible Surfaces for Wideband Wireless

Abstract

With new frequency bands opening up, emerging wireless IoT devices are capitalizing on an increasingly divergent range of frequencies. However, existing coverage provisioning practice is often tied to specific standards and frequencies. There is little shareable wireless infrastructure for concurrent links on different frequencies, across networks and standards. This paper presents Scrolls, a frequency-tunable soft smart surface system to enhance wideband, multi-network coverage. Scrolls' hardware comprises many rows of rollable thin plastic film, each attached with flexible copper strips. When rolled to different lengths, the copper strips act as wire antennas reflecting signals on the corresponding frequencies. The surface control algorithm determines the unrolled strip lengths for link enhancement by probing the search space efficiently. We build a set of distributed, composable Scrolls prototypes and deploy them in an office. Extensive evaluation shows that Scrolls can adapt the antenna lengths effectively to provide link enhancement across diverse standards on sub-6 GHz bands. For concurrent links on 900 MHz (LoRa), 2.4 GHz (Wi-Fi), 3.7 GHz, and 5 GHz, Scrolls can provide received signal strength gains to all links simultaneously, by a median of 4 dB and up to 10 dB