Title: Movable Antenna (MA) Aided Wireless Communications and Sensing: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract: Movable antenna (MA) has been recently recognized as a promising technology for enhancing wireless system performance by exploiting wireless channel spatial variation via antenna movement at the transmitter and/or receiver. In this talk, we provide a comprehensive overview of MAs, including their historical development, practical architectures and implementation methods, contemporary applications in wireless communications and sensing (ISAC), as well as mathematical models, design issues (such as channel estimation, continuous/discrete movement optimization) and promising approaches to solve them. In particular, we present a new field-response-based channel model, which greatly facilitates the analysis, design and optimization of MA-aided wireless systems. Based on this model, various performance advantages of MAs over conventional fixed-position antennas (FPAs) are demonstrated, in terms of spatial diversity/multiplexing, interference mitigation, flexible beamforming, and wireless sensing. Furthermore, a general six-dimensional MA (6DMA) system is introduced, which consists of distributed antenna surfaces that can be independently adjusted in terms of 3D position and 3D rotation to achieve the greatest flexibility in movement. We show  that by jointly designing the positions and rotations of all 6DMA surfaces equipped at the base station (BS) based on the users’ statistical channel information, the wireless network capacity can be significantly improved over the existing BS with FPAs (e.g., sector antenna arrays). Finally, we shed light on the research directions worthy of investigation in future work to unleash the full potential of MAs for wireless networks.

Bio:

Dr. Rui Zhang received the B.Eng. (first-class Hons.) and M.Eng. degrees from National University of Singapore and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, all in electrical engineering. He is now a Principal’s Diligence Chair Professor in School of Science and Engineering and Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He is also a Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore. His current research interests include wireless power transfer, UAV/satellite communications, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) and reconfigurable MIMO systems. He has published over 500 papers, which have been cited more than 90,000 times with the h-index over 135 (Google Scholar). He has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters / Clarivate Analytics since 2015. He was the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Region Best Young Researcher Award in 2011, the Young Researcher Award of National University of Singapore in 2015, the Recognition Award of WTC, SPCC and TCCN Technical Committees of the IEEE Communications Society in 2020, 2021 and 2023, respectively. He received 15 IEEE Best Journal Paper Awards, including the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications (twice), the IEEE Communications Society Heinrich Hertz Prize Paper Award (thrice), the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, etc. He has served as an Editor for several IEEE journals, including TWC, TCOM, JSAC, TSP, etc., and as TPC co-chair or organizing committee member for over 30 international conferences. He served as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Communications Society and IEEE Signal Processing Society.  He is a Fellow of IEEE and the Academy of Engineering Singapore.