Metaweave: Reconfigurable Metasurface Framework for Real-Time Beam Steering in mmWave Wireless Systems

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication demands agile beam control to sustain high data rates and link reliability in dense and mobile environments. Real-time beam steering is essential to concentrate energy toward intended users while maintaining low latency and modulation fidelity. Current approaches such as passive reflectarrays, varactor-tuned surfaces, and RF-microelectromechanical systems (RF-MEMS) trade off reconfiguration speed, efficiency, or implementation complexity. This work introduces MetaWeave, a reconfigurable metasurface framework that employs positive-intrinsic-negative (PIN) diode based 2-bit phase control and a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) driven low-latency controller to produce compact phase masks for real-time adaptation. Evaluation was performed on a 28 GHz testbed with 1 GHz bandwidth over a 3 m link using line-of-sight, non-line-of-sight, scanned-beam, and pedestrian mobility scenarios. Experimental outcomes show an SNR improvement up to $\mathbf{+ 8. 8 ~ d B}$ (pedestrian) and $\mathbf{+ 8. 2 ~ d B}$ (line-of-sight), throughput rising from 3.2 Gbps to 6.4 Gbps in the best case, sub-millisecond switching near 0.9 ms, error vector magnitude (EVM) reduction from $\mathbf{1 7. 9 \%}$ to $\mathbf{7. 4 \%}$, and a peak antenna gain of $\mathbf{2 5. 0 ~ d B i}$ with 71% aperture efficiency at a total power near 2.0 W. The results indicate that discrete phase quantization combined with lowlatency control can deliver practical, energy aware beam steering for next generation mmWave wireless links.