Rotatable Antenna-Enhanced Cell-Free Communication

Pan K, Zheng B, Tan Y, Chen F, Bjornson E, Schober R, Zhang R (2026)

Publication Type: Journal article

Publication year: 2026

Journal

IEEE Wireless Communications Letters IEEE Communications Society

DOI: 10.1109/LWC.2026.3696844

Abstract

Rotatable antenna (RA) is a promising technology that can exploit new design dimensions by optimizing the three-dimensional (3D) boresight directions of directional antennas. In this letter, we investigate an RA-enhanced cell-free system for downlink transmission, where multiple RA-equipped access points (APs) cooperatively serve multiple single-antenna users over the same time-frequency resource. Specifically, we aim to maximize the sum rate of all users by jointly optimizing the AP-user associations and the RA boresight directions. Accordingly, we propose a two-stage strategy to solve the AP-user association problem, and then employ fractional programming (FP) and successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques to optimize the RA boresight directions. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed RA-enhanced cell-free system significantly outperforms various benchmark schemes.

Authors with CRIS profile

Robert Schober Lehrstuhl für Digitale Übertragung (IDC)

Involved external institutions

South China University of Technology (SCUT) / 华南理工大学 CN China (CN) Royal Institute of Technology / Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH) SE Sweden (SE) National University of Singapore (NUS) SG Singapore (SG)

How to cite

APA:

Pan, K., Zheng, B., Tan, Y., Chen, F., Bjornson, E., Schober, R., & Zhang, R. (2026). Rotatable Antenna-Enhanced Cell-Free Communication. IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. https://doi.org/10.1109/LWC.2026.3696844

MLA:

Pan, Kecheng, et al. "Rotatable Antenna-Enhanced Cell-Free Communication." IEEE Wireless Communications Letters (2026).

BibTeX: Download