Distributed Channel Estimation for 6D Movable Antenna: Unveiling Directional Sparsity

Six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) is an innovative technology to improve wireless network capacity by adjusting 3D positions and 3D rotations of antenna surfaces based on channel spatial distribution. However, the existing works on 6DMA have assumed a central processing unit (CPU) to jointly process the signals of all 6DMA surfaces to execute various tasks. This inevitably incurs prohibitively high processing cost for channel estimation. Therefore, we propose a distributed 6DMA processing architecture to reduce processing complexity of CPU by equipping each 6DMA surface with a local processing unit (LPU). In particular, we unveil for the first time a new \textbf{\textit{directional sparsity}} property of 6DMA channels, where each user has significant channel gains only for a (small) subset of 6DMA position-rotation pairs, which can receive direct/reflected signals from users. In addition, we propose a practical three-stage protocol for the 6DMA-equipped base station (BS) to conduct statistical CSI acquisition for all 6DMA candidate positions/rotations, 6DMA position/rotation optimization, and instantaneous channel estimation for user data transmission with optimized 6DMA positions/rotations. Specifically, the directional sparsity is leveraged to develop distributed algorithms for joint sparsity detection and channel power estimation, as well as for directional sparsity-aided instantaneous channel estimation. Using the estimated channel power, we develop a channel power-based optimization algorithm to maximize the ergodic sum rate of the users by optimizing the antenna positions/rotations. Simulation results show that our channel estimation algorithms are more accurate than benchmarks with lower pilot overhead, and our optimization outperforms fluid/movable antennas optimized only in two dimensions (2D), even when the latter have perfect instantaneous CSI.

6D Movable Antenna Enhanced Wireless Network Via Discrete Position and Rotation Optimization

Six-dimensional movable antenna (6DMA) is an effective approach to improve wireless network capacity by adjusting the 3D positions and 3D rotations of distributed antenna surfaces based on the users' spatial distribution and statistical channel information. Although continuously positioning/rotating 6DMA surfaces can achieve the greatest flexibility and thus the highest capacity improvement, it is difficult to implement due to the discrete movement constraints of practical stepper motors. Thus, in this paper, we consider a 6DMA-aided base station (BS) with only a finite number of possible discrete positions and rotations for the 6DMA surfaces. We aim to maximize the average network capacity for random numbers of users at random locations by jointly optimizing the 3D positions and 3D rotations of multiple 6DMA surfaces at the BS subject to discrete movement constraints. In particular, we consider the practical cases with and without statistical channel knowledge of the users, and propose corresponding offline and online optimization algorithms, by leveraging the Monte Carlo and conditional sample mean (CSM) methods, respectively. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed offline and online algorithms for discrete position/rotation optimization of 6DMA surfaces as compared to various benchmark schemes with fixed-position antennas (FPAs) and 6DMAs with limited movability. It is shown that 6DMA-BS can significantly enhance wireless network capacity, even under discrete position/rotation constraints, by exploiting the spatial distribution characteristics of the users.

6D Movable Antenna Based on User Distribution: Modeling and Optimization

In this paper, we propose a new six-dimensional (6D) movable antenna (6DMA) system for future wireless networks to improve the communication performance. Unlike the traditional fixed-position antenna (FPA) and existing fluid antenna/two-dimensional (2D) movable antenna (FA/2DMA) systems that adjust the positions of antennas only, the proposed 6DMA system consists of distributed antenna surfaces with independently adjustable three-dimensional (3D) positions as well as 3D rotations within a given space. In particular, this paper applies the 6DMA to the base station (BS) in wireless networks to provide full degrees of freedom (DoFs) for the BS to adapt to the dynamic user spatial distribution in the network. However, a challenging new problem arises on how to optimally control the 6D positions and rotations of all 6DMA surfaces at the BS to maximize the network capacity based on the user spatial distribution, subject to the practical constraints on 6D antennas' movement. To tackle this problem, we first model the 6DMA-enabled BS and the user channels with the BS in terms of 6D positions and rotations of all 6DMA surfaces. Next, we propose an efficient alternating optimization algorithm to search for the best 6D positions and rotations of all 6DMA surfaces by leveraging the Monte Carlo simulation technique. Specifically, we sequentially optimize the 3D position/3D rotation of each 6DMA surface with those of the other surfaces fixed in an iterative manner. Numerical results show that our proposed 6DMA-BS can significantly improve the network capacity as compared to the benchmark BS architectures with FPAs or 6DMAs with limited/partial movability, especially when the user distribution is more spatially non-uniform.