Flexible Continuous Aperture Arrays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flexible continuous aperture array (FCAPA) that enhances MIMO system performance by adding surface flexibility, leading to significant improvements over traditional systems, especially as morphability increases.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel flexible EM structure, FCAPA, and demonstrates its superior performance in multi-user beamforming optimization compared to traditional CAPA systems.

Findings

FCAPA outperforms traditional CAPA in sum rate performance.

Performance improves with increased morphability.

Optimization effectively maximizes weighted sum rate.

Abstract

A novel electromagnetic (EM) structure termed flexible continuous aperture array (FCAPA) is proposed, which incorporates inherent surface flexibility into typical continuous aperture array (CAPA) systems, thereby enhancing the degrees-of-freedom (DoF) of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems equipped with this technology. By formulating and solving a downlink multi-user beamforming optimization problem to maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) of the multiple users with FCAPA, it is shown that the proposed structure outperforms typical CAPA systems by a wide margin, with performance increasing with increasing morphability.