Fluid Antenna Enabled Compact Ultra Massive Antenna Array for Satellite Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fluid antenna system-based compact ultra-massive antenna array for satellite communications, enhancing signal quality and interference suppression with reduced cost and complexity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel CUMA design utilizing fluid antennas for dynamic adaptation, providing analytical performance expressions and demonstrating performance gains over traditional methods.

Findings

CUMA significantly improves SINR with fewer RF chains.

Analytical expressions for outage probability and ergodic rate are derived.

Non-orthogonal multiple access CUMA outperforms orthogonal schemes in wideband conditions.

Abstract

Satellites provide seamless coverage and are critical for emergency communications during natural disasters. However, their performance is constrained by limited spectrum and high deployment cost. To address these issues, we propose a fluid antenna system (FAS)-based solution that enables dynamic signal adaptation. Building on this concept, a compact ultra-massive antenna array (CUMA) is introduced, where multiple ports are simultaneously activated to coherently combine signal components. This design mitigates interference while reducing cost, as each fluid antenna requires only a single RF chain yet achieves significant improvement in the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). We consider a satellite CUMA network where all ground users share the same satellite for uplink transmission, and CUMA is employed to suppress inter-user interference. Closed-form expressions for the received signal power, interference power, and their distributions are derived. Based on these results, the outage probability is obtained in a unified form along with an accurate approximation, and the ergodic rate is characterized. Our analysis identifies the conditions under which CUMA outperforms maximum ratio combining in satellite systems. Notably, with sufficiently compact fluid antenna configurations, the received signal becomes deterministic, indicating that system performance is dominated by interference statistics. Moreover, increasing the number of ports yields a linear beamforming gain. Numerical results further compare orthogonal and non-orthogonal multiple access CUMA, showing that the latter achieves superior performance under wideband conditions.