Modeling and Optimization for Rotatable Antenna Enabled Wireless Communication

Abstract: Fluid antenna system (FAS)/movable antenna (MA) has emerged as a promising technology to fully exploit the spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs). In this paper, we propose a new rotatable antenna (RA) model, as a simplified implementation of six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA), to improve the performance of wireless communication systems. Different from conventional fixed antenna, the proposed RA system can independently and flexibly change the three-dimensional (3D) orientation/boresight of each antenna by adjusting its deflection angles to achieve desired channel realizations. Specifically, we study an RA-enabled uplink communication system, where the receive beamforming and the deflection angles of all RAs are jointly optimized to maximize the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among all the users. In the special single-user and free-space propagation setup, the optimal deflection angles are derived in closed form with the maximum-ratio combining (MRC) beamformer applied at the base station (BS). In the general multi-user and multi-path setup, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to alternately optimize the receive beamforming and the deflection angles in an iterative manner. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate that the proposed RA-enabled system can significantly outperform other benchmark schemes.