Wideband and Configurable Acoustic Metasurface for Enhanced Acoustic Sensing and Communication

Acoustic metasurfaces have recently emerged as a promising technology to enhance acoustic communication and sensing performance. While promising, two key issues hinder their real-world adoption. The first issue is that configurable metasurfaces remain expensive and are not readily scalable. The second issue is that achieving operation across a large frequency range is challenging. This paper presents the first wideband, configurable acoustic metasurface. We show that with a large number of metasurface elements, a cheap and simple two-state element design can achieve performance very close to that achieved by expensive continuous-state elements. Furthermore, we enable wideband operation by fine-tuning the geometric parameters of the element structure to support similar phase changes across a large frequency range. Extensive experiments show that, with a 17.6 × 17.6cm metasurface, our system achieves average signal strength improvements of 7.5 dB and 10.5 dB in LoS and NLoS scenarios, respectively. Two representative sensing applications (i.e., respiration sensing and gesture recognition) and one communication case study are employed to show the effectiveness of the metasurface.