Capacity Maximization for Base Station with Hybrid Fixed and Movable Antennas

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid base station architecture combining fixed and movable antennas, optimizing antenna rotations to significantly enhance wireless network capacity with a practical implementation approach.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid antenna architecture with movable surfaces on existing fixed arrays and develops an efficient MCMC-based optimization method for capacity maximization.

Findings

Significant capacity improvements over benchmark schemes.

Effective antenna rotation optimization for user spatial distribution.

Feasible implementation of movable antennas on existing base stations.

Abstract

Six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) is an effective solution for enhancing wireless network capacity through the adjustment of both 3D positions and 3D rotations of distributed antennas/antenna surfaces. Although freely positioning/rotating 6DMA surfaces offers the greatest flexibility and thus highest capacity improvement, its implementation may be challenging in practice due to the drastic architecture change required for existing base stations (BSs), which predominantly adopt fixed-position antenna (FPA) arrays (e.g., sector antenna arrays). Thus, we introduce in this letter a new BS architecture called hybrid fixed and movable antennas (HFMA), which consists of both conventional FPA arrays and position/rotation-adjustable 6DMA surfaces. For ease of implementation, we consider that all 6DMA surfaces can rotate along a circular track above the FPA arrays. We aim to maximize the network capacity via optimizing the rotation angles of all 6DMA surfaces based on the users' spatial distribution. Since this problem is combinatorial and its optimal solution requires prohibitively high computational complexity via exhaustive search, we propose an alternative adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo based method to solve it more efficiently. Finally, we present simulation results that show significant performance gains achieved by our proposed design over various benchmark schemes.