Hierarchically Tunable 6DMA for Wireless Communication and Sensing: Modeling and Performance Optimization

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This paper proposes a new hierarchically tunable six-dimensional movable antenna (HT-6DMA) architecture for base station (BS) in future wireless networks, aiming to improve the performance of both wireless communication and sensing. The HT-6DMA BS consists of multiple antenna arrays that can flexibly move on a spherical surface, with their three-dimensional (3D) positions and 3D rotations/orientations efficiently characterized in the global spherical coordinate system (SCS) and their individual local SCSs, respectively. As a result, the 6DMA system is hierarchically tunable in the sense that each array’s global position and local rotation can be separately adjusted in a sequential manner with the other being fixed, thus greatly reducing their design complexity and improving the achievable performance. In particular, we consider an HT-6DMA BS serving multiple single-antenna users in the uplink communication or sensing potential unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)/drones in a given airway area. Specifically, for the communication scenario, we aim to maximize the average sum rate of communication users in the long term by optimizing the positions and rotations of all 6DMA arrays at the BS. For the airway sensing scenario, we maximize the minimum received sensing signal power along the airway by optimizing the 6DMA arrays’ positions and rotations along with the BS’s transmit covariance matrix. Despite that the formulated problems are both non-convex and challenging to solve, we propose efficient solutions to them by exploiting the hierarchical tunability of positions/rotations of 6DMA arrays in our proposed model. Numerical results show that the proposed HT-6DMA design significantly outperforms not only the traditional BS with fixed-position antennas (FPAs), but also the existing 6DMA scheme based on alternating array position/rotation optimization. Furthermore, it is unveiled that the performance gains of HT-6DMA mostly come from the arrays’ global position adjustments on the spherical surface, rather than their local rotation adjustments, which provides a useful guide for implementing 6DMA systems under practical performance-complexity trade-off consideration.