Revisiting Outage Probability Analysis for Two-User Fluid Antenna Multiple Access System

Fluid antenna system (FAS) is a new flexible antenna technology that offers a new approach to multiple access, referred to as fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA). The performance of FAMA has been investigated but previous results were based on simplified spatial correlation models. In this paper, we will revisit FAMA for the two-user case and study the outage probability by characterizing the joint spatial correlation among the ports. We first derive a closed-form lower bound on the outage probability and reveal that in the absence of spatial correlation, the outage probability of the system decreases exponentially as the number of ports increases. We then show that the channel model can be greatly simplified by focusing upon a limited number of channel variables, allowing us to derive the outage probability using the approximate model. To gain insight, we further approximate the channel model and provide another approximation of the outage probability that is easier to compute. Simulation results validate the approximations and demonstrate that the outage probability decreases with the number of ports but has an error floor unless the antenna size is increased. Also, when the number of ports is fixed, the outage probability initially decreases exponentially with the size but eventually approaches the lower bound.