Full-Phase-Range Acoustic RIS: Implementation and Beamforming Design

Underwater acoustic communication (UWA) faces significant coverage challenges due to the depth-varying sound speed gradients and the presence of sound shadow zones. Acoustic reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is promising as an enabler to enhance acoustic signal quality and reliability. In this paper, we propose a novel full-phase-range acoustic RIS with effective acoustic beamforming scheme. Electrical unit parameters are carefully designed with Tonpilz hardware and equivalent circuit architecture. The reflective magnitude-phase coupling is analytically modelled by dual-quadratic expression. Furthermore, we propose one Majorization-Minimization (MM)-based acoustic RIS beamforming scheme, where alternative maximization approach is coordinated with fractional programming and MM methods to achieve the convex relaxation and near-optimal solutions.