Open Experimental Measurements of Sub-6GHz Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

TL;DR

This paper addresses the lack of open, real-measurement data for sub-6 GHz RIS and the need for reproducible benchmarks. It presents a fully configurable 100-element RIS prototype operating at $5.3$ GHz, integrated with OFDM transceivers in an anechoic chamber to collect measurements. Two public datasets are released: a beampattern dataset capturing radiation patterns across rotating configurations and an absorption-mode dataset examining performance when only subsets of active elements are used. Analyses illustrate how the data enable 3D pattern reconstruction, ML-based inference of RIS configurations, and localization-oriented insights, advancing practical RIS deployment.

Abstract

In this paper, we present two datasets that we make publicly available for research. The data is collected in a testbed comprised of a custom-made Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) prototype and two regular OFDM transceivers within an anechoic chamber. First, we discuss the details of the testbed and equipment used, including insights about the design and implementation of our RIS prototype. We further present the methodology we employ to gather measurement samples, which consists of letting the RIS electronically steer the signal reflections from an OFDM transmitter toward a specific location. To this end, we evaluate a suitably designed configuration codebook and collect measurement samples of the received power with an OFDM receiver. Finally, we present the resulting datasets, their format, and examples of exploiting this data for research purposes.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: RIS board schematic rossanese2022designing.
• Figure 2: RIS board prototype (amplified in the right-hand side of the figure) in an anechoic chamber along with an OFDM transmitter (TX) and an OFDM receiver (RX) used to obtain the measurements provided in the dataset presented in this paper rossanese2022designing.
• Figure 3: Anechoic chamber testbed bird's-eye view rossanese2022designing.
• Figure 4: Empirical CDF for the RSRP averaged over different number of samples as compared to the ground truth.
• Figure 5: Power received at a fixed receiver for different values of the main beam direction in the azimuth and elevation of the RIS, represented by $\theta_n$ and $\phi_n$, respectively. The measured data is shown in blue color, while the orange lines represent the prediction via DNN.