ACM SIGCOMM 2026 · Denver, CO

FlowForm: Scalable Passive Metasurface Network for mmWave Coverage Expansion

Wuqiong Zhao, Baicheng Chen, Kai Zheng, Xingyu Chen, Wenqian Zhang, Xinyu Zhang

University of California San Diego

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A passive metasurface network deployed across an environment, redirecting mmWave signals to expand coverage.
A network of passive metasurfaces extends mmWave coverage without active reflectors.

Key Insights

This paper shows that passive metasurfaces can form a network to double the coverage of wireless networks, at orders of magnitude lower cost compared with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS).

News Coverage

Citation

@inproceedings{zhao2026flowform,
  author    = {Zhao, Wuqiong and Chen, Baicheng and Zheng, Kai and Chen, Xingyu and Zhang, Wenqian and Zhang, Xinyu},
  title     = {{FlowForm}: Scalable Passive Metasurface Network for {mmWave} Coverage Expansion},
  year      = {2026},
  isbn      = {9798400724671},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address   = {New York, NY, USA},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3789240.3829102},
  doi       = {10.1145/3789240.3829102},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2026 Conference},
  pages     = {564–581},
  numpages  = {18},
  location  = {Denver, CO, USA},
  series    = {SIGCOMM '26}
}