A Novel RIS-Empowered Base Station: A Practical Implementation and Experimental Validation

This article presents a novel reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-integrated base station (BS) by deploying an RIS very close to the base station antennas (BAs), within its radiative near-field range. We propose a practical algorithm to maximize the performance of uplink communications with the proposed RIS-integrated BS while maintaining reasonable complexity. Furthermore, we have implemented a testbed to experiment with the proposed RIS-integrated BS-based uplink multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system. The experimental data validates the performance of the proposed RIS-integrated BS-based uplink MIMO system.