Rotatable Antenna System Empowered Low-Altitude Economy: Opportunities and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of rotatable antenna systems to improve low-altitude coverage and reliability in emerging low-altitude economy networks, addressing current limitations of traditional base stations.

Contribution

It introduces practical deployment strategies for RAS in LAE, discusses key design issues, and demonstrates performance improvements through experiments and simulations.

Findings

RAS enhances low-altitude coverage and stability.

Deployment strategies improve network performance.

Experimental results confirm performance gains.

Abstract

Low-altitude economy (LAE) is an emerging technological paradigm that enables continuous airspace coverage at multiple altitudes by providing highly reliable data connectivity for numerous low-altitude applications. However, existing networks cannot sufficiently support LAE development, as current base stations (BSs) are primarily designed for terrestrial users and lack the capability to provide continuous coverage at low altitudes. To overcome these challenges, rotatable antenna system (RAS) is introduced in LAE, enabling flexible beamforming by dynamically adjusting the boresight of directional antennas to extend low-altitude coverage and enhance the stability of data transmission. In this article, we first provide an overview of RAS-empowered LAE applications, including low-altitude communication, sensing, control, and computation. Then, we present two practical RAS deployment strategies for LAE scenarios, namely RAS-aided multi-BS and multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) cooperative coverages, as well as provide detailed discussions on their system architectures and performance benefits. Additionally, key design issues of RAS in LAE are discussed, including channel modeling and estimation, cellular access and interference cancellation, as well as RAS configuration and boresight optimization. Finally, we demonstrate the performance gains of RAS in LAE networks through experimental and simulation results.