Experimental Evaluation of the Environmental Impact on the RIS-Aided Communications

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have attracted considerable research interest due to their potential to actively shape the wireless propagation environment by individually controlling the phase response of each reflecting element. This study focuses on the practical evaluation of this concept through a series of targeted measurements conducted under real-world conditions. The experimental campaign investigates key influencing parameters, including azimuth and elevation angles, signal polarization, the number of RIS panels, and transmitter–receiver separation distance. The resulting data provide a comprehensive view of the reflection characteristics of RIS-enabled surfaces. Based on the measured results, we conduct a conceptual analysis exploring the feasibility of designing a codebook composed of predefined RIS configurations (codewords) suitable for specific application scenarios. This work contributes to bridging the gap between theoretical RIS models and their practical deployment in future wireless communication systems. The presented experimental results provide insight into the reflection behavior of RIS under diverse configuration parameters.