A Low-Power Distributed System of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Dynamic Signal Enhancements

Distributed architecture enhances the robustness and adaptability in wireless communication, radar, and Internet of Things (IoT) systems, but faces the challenges of nodes synchronization, complex collaboration mechanism, and increased communication overhead. Especially when building large-scale systems, power consumption and channel resource management become the bottlenecks. Several researches have shown that the systems assisted by reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) offer distinct advantages such as simple structure, ease of integration, and high flexibility. However, the current researches on distributed RIS (DRIS) are largely limited to theoretical analyses under ideal conditions, and neglect the increases in power consumption and computational complexity. Here, a low-power DRIS system is proposed, which is specifically designed for wireless communication scenarios to dynamically enhance the signal quality in various areas while maintaining an ultra-low power of less than 5.67 mW per RIS on average. A pre-trained blind beamforming optimization algorithm and a visual tracking platform are integrated to the DRIS system to consistently realize superior performance even in complicated non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenarios. The reliability and effectiveness of DRIS are experimentally demonstrated via a wireless data transmission platform, indicating that the proposed DRIS system is a promising and effective solution for future wireless communication, radar, and IoT applications.