Six-Dimensional Movable Antenna Enabled Wideband THz Communications

TL;DR

This paper proposes a six-dimensional movable antenna system for wideband THz communications, optimizing 3D positions and rotations to mitigate beam squint effects and enhance system performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel 6DMA-enabled system with joint optimization of antenna positioning, rotation, and hybrid beamforming, using an alternating optimization algorithm.

Findings

Achieves higher sum-rate compared to fixed-position antennas.

Effectively mitigates beam squint effects in wideband THz systems.

Demonstrates the effectiveness of 6DMA in enhancing communication performance.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA)-enabled wideband terahertz (THz) communication system with sub-connected hybrid beamforming architecture at the base station (BS). In particular, the three-dimensional (3D) position and 3D rotation of each 6DMA surface can be flexibly reconfigured to mitigate the beam squint effects instead of introducing costly true-time-delay devices. We first analyze the normalized array gain in the 6DMA-enabled wideband THz systems based on the beam squint effects. Then, we formulate a sum-rate maximization problem via jointly optimizing 3D positions, 3D rotations, and hybrid analog/digital beamforming. To solve the non-convex problem, an alternating optimization algorithm is developed that decomposes the original problem into three subproblems, which are solved alternately. Specifically, given the positions and rotations of 6DMA surfaces, we first reformulate the objective function and design a semidefinite relaxation-based alternating minimization scheme to obtain the hybrid analog/digital beamforming. Then, the positions and rotations of the 6DMA surfaces are further optimized through a feasible gradient descent procedure. The final solutions are obtained by repeating the above procedure until convergence. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme compared with conventional fixed-position antenna architectures.