RIS Wireless Connectivity Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- A small, young corpus. 13 patent families total, filing activity only starting in earnest after 2017 and peaking so far at 5 families in 2023 — this is still an early-stage claim space, not a settled one.
- No single assignee dominates. Recent-year momentum is thin across the board: most tracked assignees show zero filings in the latest year, with only one entity registering a single filing — the field is still open to new entrants.
- Filings concentrate in transmission, not antennas. All 13 families sit in H04B (transmission), while only 3 touch H01Q (antenna hardware) — the control-link and signalling layer is where the claim activity is, not the physical surface itself.
Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 13 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
This dataset tracks patent families at the intersection of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) — sometimes filed as intelligent reflecting surfaces — and the control-link and IoT connectivity layer that governs them: low-latency control channels, wireless control links, and IoT-controlled RIS architectures. It excludes general RIS physical-layer or metamaterial patents that do not touch the control or signalling claim, which keeps the corpus small but sharply focused on how RIS panels are commanded, coordinated and integrated into a wireless network rather than how the reflecting elements themselves are built.
With only 13 families across an 11-year window, this is a niche but active pocket of RIS patenting. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 and 2026 counts will rise as later applications publish; the true trajectory is likely steeper than the raw trend line currently shows.
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Filing trends and technology composition
Two views of the same 13-family corpus: how filing activity has moved year over year, and how those families distribute across the IPC subclasses that define the control-link space.
Filing trend: slow start, accelerating mid-decade
Filings sit at zero through 2017 and remain flat through the early period before accelerating into a 2023 peak of 5 families in a single year. The 2022 midpoint reads zero, confirming the growth is recent rather than a long-running steady climb — this is a technology area whose patent activity effectively started mid-decade.
IPC composition: transmission-layer claims dominate
Every one of the 13 families is classified under H04B (transmission), 4 also touch H04W (wireless network architecture), and only 3 extend into H01Q (antenna hardware). The pattern says most applicants are claiming how the control signal reaches and commands the surface, not the physical antenna structure of the surface itself.
Shares are the percentage of the 13 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Wireless Connectivity and IoT with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about reconfigurable intelligent surface wireless connectivity and iot and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaMost-cited records in this corpus
Reconfigurable intelligent surface-assisted flexible wireless network
This Dell Products filing subdivides a reconfigurable intelligent surface into subarrays of unit cells that can each be assigned a different function or directivity. A controller responds to control-signal data from a base station or user equipment to dynamically reallocate cell counts between functions, including a receive-and-forward path from base station to user equipment through the surface.Filed 2026-01-01 — illustrates the dynamic-subarray-allocation approach to RIS control that is becoming a distinct claim strategy within this corpus.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20230308139A1 | Systems and methods for MIMO communication with controllable environments | 26 |
| 2 | WO2022133952A1 | Systems and methods for MIMO communication with controllable environments | 22 |
| 3 | US20240413857A1 | Method and apparatus for controlling multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces | 1 |
Citation counts reward older filings that have had more time to accumulate references within this searched corpus; treat them as a signal of influence on subsequent filers, not as a ranking of current technical importance.
Publication numbers are shown where the record carries one (3 of 3 rows); clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the numbers mean for a filing decision
Three findings stand out once the family count and citation pattern are read together with the recency data.
A niche corpus still forming
13 families across 11 years is small enough that a single well-drafted application can meaningfully shift the competitive picture. Most of the activity is concentrated in a narrow 2020-2023 window, meaning the prior art a new filer must clear is recent, not decades deep.
Activity peaked, then the picture is unclear
2023 is the busiest year on record, but publication lag means 2024-2026 filings are still arriving. Reading the recent flatline as a slowdown would be premature; it more likely reflects filings not yet published.
Control-link claims outnumber hardware claims
Every family touches H04B and only 3 touch H01Q, confirming that applicants are protecting signalling and control architecture far more than the physical reflecting surface. Antenna-hardware claims remain comparatively open.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to reconfigurable intelligent surface wireless connectivity and iot, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and how much runway is left
Recent-year momentum across the tracked assignees is thin: of the six entities with visible activity, five show zero filings in the latest year and one shows a single filing. That pattern is more consistent with a field still being explored by multiple institutions than one being locked up by an incumbent.
A single active filer in the most recent year
Kyung Hee University (rendered here from the evidence as a university assignee) is the only tracked entity with a filing in the latest year, at 1 family. Every other tracked assignee — including large telecom and electronics names — shows zero in that same window, which is more likely a publication-lag artefact than an actual pause.
Large players are present but not currently visible in the newest filings
Huawei, Samsung Electronics, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) and Dell Products all appear in the assignee set but register zero filings in the most recent tracked year. Given the small corpus size, this says more about publication timing than about strategic withdrawal.
Filing is split evenly between Europe and the US
The European Patent Office and the USPTO each account for 4 of the tracked records, with WIPO PCT, China, India and Malaysia making up the remainder. No single jurisdiction has pulled ahead, suggesting applicants have not yet settled on one primary market for RIS control-link protection.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Kyung Hee University | 1 | — |
| Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. | 0 | — |
| Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) | 0 | — |
| University of Electronic Science and Technology of China | 0 | — |
| Dell Products L.P. | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The filing pattern here is still forming, which changes how a freedom-to-operate or whitespace review should be scoped.
Re-run the search after each publication cycle
Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2024-2026 counts in this dataset will keep rising. A landscape review done today should be refreshed within a year to catch the filings that are already in the pipeline but not yet visible.
Explore live filings in Eureka →Map the control-link claims against the antenna-hardware claims separately
With 13 of 13 families in H04B but only 3 in H01Q, a claim search that treats RIS as one undifferentiated category will overstate crowding in the hardware layer and understate it in the signalling layer.
Build a custom IPC breakdown in Eureka →Common questions about RIS control-link patents
This tracked dataset contains 13 patent families filed between 2015 and 2026, specifically covering reconfigurable intelligent surface filings that also claim a control link, wireless control channel, low-latency control, or IoT-controlled RIS architecture. That is a small corpus compared to RIS patenting overall, because most general RIS filings claim the reflecting surface hardware or beamforming behaviour rather than the control-link layer. Anyone benchmarking against a larger RIS number should check whether that broader count includes hardware-only filings this dataset deliberately excludes.
The tracked assignee set includes Huawei, Samsung Electronics, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), a Chinese university (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), Dell Products, and Kyung Hee University, but no single one of them holds a dominant share of the 13-family corpus. Recent-year momentum is thin across all of them — most show zero filings in the latest tracked year — which points to a field that is still being explored by multiple institutions rather than one that has consolidated around an incumbent. New entrants should expect to compete on drafting quality rather than needing to displace an established leader.
In this dataset, RIS and intelligent reflecting surface are treated as the same underlying technology and searched together, since applicants use both terms interchangeably depending on filing region and drafting convention. The functional distinction that matters more for a claim search is not the naming but whether the filing claims the control/signalling layer versus the physical surface hardware — this dataset is scoped to the former. Anyone searching prior art should include both terms to avoid missing relevant families filed under the alternate name.
H04B (transmission systems) covers every one of the 13 tracked families and is the anchor classification for this space. H04W (wireless communication networks) appears in 4 records and typically covers network-architecture-level claims, while H01Q (antennas) appears in only 3 and covers physical antenna-element claims. A freedom-to-operate search that only checks H01Q will miss the great majority of relevant prior art in this niche, since the control-link claims sit predominantly in H04B and H04W.
The clearest gap is in antenna-hardware integration with control logic — only 3 of 13 families touch H01Q, meaning claims that tie a specific antenna-element design to a control protocol are comparatively rare. Multi-RIS coordinated control protocols and IoT-native low-power control channels are also thinly represented relative to how much general interest RIS has attracted, since most of the existing filings focus on single-surface control rather than coordinating several surfaces or optimising for constrained IoT power budgets. A first mover drafting claims around low-power, multi-surface coordination would be filing into comparatively open space as of this data cut-off.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.