Towards Affordable RIS Devices: Electromagnetic Simulation and Implementation of Metasurfaces

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces can change their reflective response to adapt to changes in the communication channel, where such response is obtained by modifying the reflection coefficient of each of the unit cells that make up the surface. The paper analyzes, through electromagnetic simulations and actual PCB designs, the viability and performance of four different metasurface configurations, whose implementation has been carried out using standard PCB materials. Four surfaces with fixed reflection response have been used to asses the viability of the proposed schemes and materials for future controllable RIS implementations. Each one of the test designs uses a different element discretization configuration. An analysis via EM simulation and comparison with experimental results has been performed to study the influence of the cell discretization on the response of the surfaces, at 9.6 GHz. The conducted study and the obtained results may be useful for future designs and implementations of adaptive response RIS at higher frequencies.