Joint Communication and Trajectory Design for Movable Antenna Systems

Abstract: Movable antennas (MAs) have attracted significant attention in wireless communications due to their ability to reconfigure channel conditions by flexibly adjusting the antenna positions within a confined region. However, MA movement generally incurs a non-negligible delay, which may significantly limit the data transmission time at optimized positions. To tackle this challenge, this paper investigates a new joint communication and trajectory optimization problem, where each MA transmits while moving along an optimized trajectory to prolong the effective data transmission time. Focusing on a single-MA system, our goal is to maximize the average data rate by optimizing the MA's positions over time, subject to its maximum velocity constraints. However, this continuous-time antenna position optimization problem is highly non-convex and challenging to solve. To tackle this challenge, we first consider a special case with two channel paths and derive the optimal MA trajectory in closed form. For other general cases, we ingeniously reformulate the average rate maximization problem into a fixed-hop shortest path problem in graph theory by sampling the antenna movement region into a multitude of discrete points, and solve it optimally. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can significantly improve the data rate compared to other baseline schemes.