Performance Analysis and Optimization for Movable Antenna Aided Wideband Communications

Movable antenna (MA) has emerged as a promising technology to enhance wireless communication performance by enabling the local movement of antennas at the transmitter (Tx) and/or receiver (Rx) for achieving more favorable channel conditions. As the existing studies on MA-aided wireless communications have mainly considered narrow-band transmission in flat fading channels, we investigate in this paper the MA-aided wideband communications employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in frequency-selective fading channels. Under the general multi-tap field-response channel model, the wireless channel variations in both space and frequency are characterized with different positions of the MAs. Unlike the narrow-band transmission where the optimal MA position at the Tx/Rx simply maximizes the single-tap channel amplitude, the MA position in the wideband case needs to balance the amplitudes and phases over multiple channel taps in order to maximize the OFDM transmission rate over multiple frequency subcarriers. First, we derive an upper bound on the OFDM achievable rate in closed form when the size of the Tx/Rx region for antenna movement is arbitrarily large. Next, we develop a parallel greedy ascent (PGA) algorithm to obtain locally optimal solutions to the MAs’ positions for OFDM rate maximization subject to finite-size Tx/Rx regions. To reduce computational complexity, a simplified PGA algorithm is also provided to optimize the MAs’ positions more efficiently. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PGA algorithms can approach the OFDM rate upper bound closely with the increase of Tx/Rx region sizes and outperform conventional systems with fixed-position antennas (FPAs) under the wideband channel setup.