Simultaneous Perfect Anomalous Reflection and Angle of Arrival Sensing in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

Abstract This work introduces reconfigurable Intelligent surfaces (RISs) designed to simultaneously reflect single or multiple incident waves toward one or more receivers and sense their angles of arrival (AoA). Anomalous reflection with strongly suppressed parasitic scattering is achieved through an in situ optimization of either the currents flowing on array elements or the far field in the receiver direction. The suppression of parasitic scattering allows to accurately and without additional measurements or computations detect the angles of arrival of the illuminations through the spatial Fourier transform of the optimized current distribution through the controllable reactive loads. Unlike other recently proposed methods, the proposed scheme of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) does not require any pre‐computed data sets and works for an arbitrary number of simultaneous illuminations. As a proof of principle, the design and analysis of several reconfigurable intelligent surfaces consisting of an array of loaded wires above a ground plane are conducted using full‐wave simulations.