Modeling and Performance Analysis for Movable Antenna Enabled Wireless Communications

In this paper, we propose a novel antenna architecture called movable antenna (MA) to improve the performance of wireless communication systems. Different from conventional fixed-position antennas (FPAs) that undergo random wireless channel variation, the MAs with the capability of flexible movement can be deployed at positions with more favorable channel conditions to achieve higher spatial diversity gains. To characterize the general multi-path channel in a given region or field where the MAs are deployed, a field-response model is developed by leveraging the amplitude, phase, and angle of arrival/angle of departure (AoA/AoD) information on each of the multiple channel paths under the far-field condition. Based on this model, we then analyze the maximum channel gain achieved by a single receive MA as compared to its FPA counterpart in both deterministic and stochastic channels. First, in the deterministic channel case, we show the periodic behavior of the multi-path channel gain in a given spatial field, which can be exploited for analyzing the maximum channel gain of the MA. Next, in the case of stochastic channels, the expected value of an upper bound on the maximum channel gain of the MA in an infinitely large receive region is derived for different numbers of channel paths. The approximate cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the maximum channel gain is also obtained in closed form, which is useful to evaluate the outage probability of the MA system. Moreover, our results reveal that higher performance gains by the MA over the FPA can be acquired when the number of channel paths increases due to more pronounced small-scale fading effects in the spatial domain. Numerical examples are presented which validate our analytical results and demonstrate that the MA system can reap considerable performance gains over the conventional FPA systems with/without antenna selection (AS), and even achieve comparable performance to the single-input multiple-output (SIMO) beamforming system.

I. Introduction

In the process of wireless systems evolution, larger capacity and higher reliability have always been the main objectives to pursue. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) or multi-user/multi-antenna communication has been a key enabling technology in this endeavor, which lifts the veil on the new degrees of freedom (DoFs) in the spatial domain for improving the communication performance [1], [2], [3]. With the current trend and future expectation of wireless communication systems migrating to higher frequency bands, such as millimeter-wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) bands, the decreasing wavelength results in smaller antenna size, which renders the MIMO system to be of larger scale (a.k.a. massive MIMO) in order to compensate for the more severe propagation loss [4], [5], [6], [7]. Compared to conventional MIMO, massive MIMO is able to exploit the spatial correlation of large antenna arrays for attaining higher array gains and mitigating the multi-user interference more effectively [7], [8], [9], [10].