Trackable Electronic Deception Enabled by Space-Time Coding Metasurface

Abstract

Space-time coding metasurfaces (STCMs) have gained a great deal of achievements in the fields of radar and communication, but they have rarely been explored in the field of electronic jamming. The existing researches use time-varying surface or phase-switched screens to realize electronic deceptions, but the deceptions are completely passive and are limited in the time-frequency domain. Here, a mechanism of STCM-based deceptions is presented in the space and the time-frequency domains, and precise designs of the STCM-based deceptions are achieved by performing shifting operations on the space-time coding sequences of the STCM. Moreover, STCM-based DOA (direction-of-arrival) estimation is integrated with the deception procedure to achieve trackable electronic deception which cannot be realized by completely passive electronic jamming. A prototype system of the STCM-based deception is built to verify the deception performance, and the experimental results agree well with the numerical simulations. This work extends the research and the applications of the STCMs, hence showing great scientific and engineering significance.