Rotatable Antenna Enabled Wireless Communication and Sensing: Opportunities and Challenges

TL;DR

Rotatable antennas (RA) are an emerging technology that enhances wireless communication and sensing by enabling flexible boresight adjustment, improving performance metrics like interference mitigation, spatial multiplexing, and sensing resolution.

Contribution

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of RA architectures, discusses their performance benefits, and presents experimental and simulation validation of RA's advantages in communication and sensing.

Findings

RA improves interference mitigation and beamforming.

RA enhances sensing coverage and resolution.

Experimental results confirm performance gains.

Abstract

Non-fixed flexible antenna architectures, such as fluid antenna system (FAS), movable antenna (MA), and pinching antenna, have garnered significant interest in recent years. Among them, rotatable antenna (RA) is an emerging technology that offers significant potential to enhance wireless communication and sensing performance by flexibly adjusting the boresight of directional antennas. Specifically, RA can flexibly reconfigure its boresight direction via mechanical or electronic means, thereby improving communication channel conditions and/or enhancing sensing resolution and range. In this article, we first provide an overview of RA, covering its hardware architectures and radiation pattern characterization. We then illustrate how RA improves communication performance through interference mitigation, spatial multiplexing, and flexible beamforming, as well as sensing capabilities in terms of coverage, resolution, and multi-target/dimensional sensing. Furthermore, we highlight representative applications of RA and discuss key design challenges in RA systems, including rotational scanning scheduling, channel estimation/sensing, boresight optimization, and RA configuration. Finally, both experimental and simulation results are provided to validate the performance gains achieved by RA for both communication and sensing. Leveraging its unique capabilities in flexible antenna/array rotation to adapt to various communication/sensing requirements and channel conditions, RA is poised to become a key enabler of future intelligent, resilient, and agile wireless networks.