Design and Implementation of mmWave Surface Wave Enabled Fluid Antennas and Experimental Results for Fluid Antenna Multiple Access

Abstract: While multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies continue to advance, concerns arise as to how MIMO can remain scalable if more users are to be accommodated with an increasing number of antennas at the base station (BS) in the upcoming sixth generation (6G). Recently, the concept of fluid antenna system (FAS) has emerged, which promotes position flexibility to enable transmitter channel state information (CSI) free spatial multiple access on one radio frequency (RF) chain. On the theoretical side, the fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA) approach offers a scalable alternative to massive MIMO spatial multiplexing. However, FAMA lacks experimental validation and the hardware implementation of FAS remains a mysterious approach. The aim of this paper is to provide a novel hardware design for FAS and evaluate the performance of FAMA using experimental data. Our FAS design is based on a dynamically reconfigurable "fluid" radiator which is capable of adjusting its position within a predefined space. One single-channel fluid antenna (SCFA) and one double-channel fluid antenna (DCFA) are designed, electromagnetically simulated, fabricated, and measured. The measured radiation patterns of prototypes are imported into channel and network models for evaluating their performance in FAMA. The experimental results demonstrate that in the 5G millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands (24-30 GHz), the FAS prototypes can vary their gain up to an averaged value of 11 dBi. In the case of 4-user FAMA, the double-channel FAS can significantly reduce outage probability by 57% and increases the multiplexing gain to 2.27 when compared to a static omnidirectional antenna.