Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Enabled Programmable Antenna Chamber: Concept and Preliminary Experiments

Antenna chambers are RF-shielded enclosures which are required for antenna and radio performance measurements. Typically, anechoic chambers (ACs) are used for measuring directional metrics (e.g. antenna pattern, effective isotropic power etc.), while reverberation chambers (RCs) are widely used for non-directional measurements (e.g. antenna efficiency, total radiated power etc.). When a device under test requires both types of measurements, testing needs to be conducted sequentially in an AC and an RC. This leads to significant time inefficiencies due to the need to set up and calibrate two separate measurement setups in two different chambers. To address these issues, this letter proposes a programmable chamber framework capable of electronically switching between AC and RC modes by programming the reflective intelligent surface-enabled sidewalls. This framework is highly attractive for the industry as it supports both directional and non-directional measurements within a single chamber. The letter outlines the conceptual framework, discusses design considerations, and presents preliminary experimental validation of reflective intelligent surface-enabled sidewall with the designed phase-setting configurations to emulate the radio absorber sidewall of an AC and the metal plate sidewall of an RC. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of the proposed approach.