Reducing Simulation Effort for RIS Optimization using an Efficient Far-Field Approximation

Optimization of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) via a previously introduced method is effective, but time-consuming, because multiport impedance or scatter matrices are required for each transmitter and receiver position, which generally must be obtained through full-wave simulation. Herein, a simple and efficient far-field approximation is introduced, to extrapolate scatter matrices for arbitrary receiver and transmitter positions from only a single simulation while still maintaining high accuracy suitable for optimization purposes. This is demonstrated through comparisons of the optimized capacitance values and further supported by empirical measurements.