Fluid Antenna with Linear MMSE Channel Estimation for Large-Scale Cellular Networks

The concept of reconfigurable fluid antennas (FA) is a potential and promising solution to enhance the spectral efficiency of wireless communication networks. Despite their many advantages, FA-enabled communications have limitations as they require an enormous amount of spectral resources in order to select the most desirable position of the radiating element from a large number of prescribed locations. In this paper, we present an analytical framework for the outage performance of large-scale FA-enabled communications, where all user equipments (UEs) employ circular multi-FA array. In contrast to existing studies, which assume perfect channel state information, the developed framework accurately captures the channel estimation errors on the performance of the considered network deployments. In particular, we focus on the limited coherence interval scenario, where a novel sequential linear minimum mean-squared error (LMMSE)-based channel estimation method is performed for only a very small number of FA ports. Next, for the communication of each BS with its associated UE, a low-complexity port-selection technique is employed, where the port that provides the highest signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio is selected among the ports that are estimated to provide the strongest channel from each FA. By using stochastic geometry tools, we derive both analytical and closed-form expressions for the outage probability, highlighting the impact of channel estimation on the performance of FA-based UEs. Our results reveal the trade-off imposed between improving the network's performance and reducing the channel estimation quality, indicating new insights for the design of FA-enabled communications.