Rotatable Antenna-Enhanced Cell-Free Communication

Abstract: Rotatable antenna (RA) is a promising technology that can exploit new spatial degrees-of-freedom (DoFs) by flexibly adjusting the three-dimensional (3D) boresight direction of antennas. In this letter, we investigate an RA-enhanced cell-free system for downlink transmission, where multiple RA-equipped access points (APs) cooperatively serve multiple single-antenna users over the same time-frequency resource. Specifically, we aim to maximize the sum rate of all users by jointly optimizing the AP-user associations and the RA boresight directions. Accordingly, we propose a two-stage strategy to solve the AP-user association problem, and then employ fractional programming (FP) and successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques to optimize the RA boresight directions. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed RA-enhanced cell-free system significantly outperforms various benchmark schemes.