Codebook-based Port Selection and Combining for CSI-Free Uplink Fluid Antenna Multiple Access

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel uplink fluid antenna multiple access scheme that uses a codebook-based port selection and combining method, enabling high data rates and scalability without requiring the base station to have channel state information.

Contribution

The paper proposes a new codebook-based port selection and combining framework for uplink FAMA that operates without base station CSI and includes lightweight collision management strategies.

Findings

Achieves higher data rates than fixed-antenna systems

Maintains low complexity and scalable performance

Effectively reduces base station processing load

Abstract

Fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA) has recently emerged as a simple, promising scheme for large-scale multiuser connectivity, offering strong scalability with low implementation complexity. Nevertheless, most existing FAMA studies focus on downlink transmission under perfect channel state information (CSI) at the receiver side, while the uplink counterpart remains largely unexplored. This paper proposes a novel codebook-based port selection and combining (CPSC) FAMA framework for the uplink communications without CSI at the base station (BS). In the proposed scheme, a predefined codebook is designed and broadcast by the BS. Each user equipment (UE) employs a fluid antenna, acquires its local CSI and independently chooses the most suitable codeword, activates the corresponding fluid antenna ports, and determines the combining weights to achieve a two-way match between the selected codeword and the instantaneous effective channel. The BS then separates the superimposed user signals through codebook-guided projection operations without requiring global CSI or multiuser joint optimization. To handle potential codeword collisions, three lightweight scheduling strategies are introduced, offering flexible trade-offs between signaling overhead and collision avoidance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed CPSC-FAMA approach achieves substantially higher rates than fixed-antenna systems while maintaining low complexity. Moreover, the results confirm that amortizing the optimization cost over the UEs effectively reduces the BS processing burden and enhances scalability, making the proposed scheme a strong candidate for future sixth-generation (6G) networks.