Guest Editorial: Intelligent metasurfaces for smart connectivity.

In their paper 'RIS-Assisted Secure UAV Communications with Resource Allocation and Cooperative Jamming', Guo et al. combine an RIS with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to improve the physical layer security of a wireless network. Current 5G wireless systems depend heavily on the quality of the wireless propagation environment, which had conventionally been modelled as an exogenous entity that can only be adapted and not controlled. This new vision of wireless network design is enabled by an emerging technology of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), also known as intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). [Extracted from the article]