UAV wireless links balanced with antenna rotation delay
UAV Rotatable Antenna under Rotation Delay
Information Theory
Summary
Rotatable antennas can point to improve wireless connections, but moving them takes time that reduces actual data transmission. The authors created a model that includes this rotation delay to find the best balance between rotating antennas and using the time to send data. They found conditions where it’s best not to rotate, rotate a little, or rotate fully to maximize communication rates. For multiple users, they proposed an efficient algorithm to balance rotation time and beamforming for better overall performance. This work shows the importance of considering mechanical delays when using rotatable antennas on drones or similar systems.
What this means in practice
- •For drone communication engineers: Design UAV antenna systems that optimize data rates by jointly managing rotation delays and beamforming.
- •For wireless network operators: Improve multi-user UAV communication scheduling by accounting for antenna reconfiguration delays to enhance overall network throughput.
Authors
Yinmei Xie, Chiya Zhang, Chunlong He, Weizheng Zhang, Wei Wang
Abstract
Rotatable antennas (RAs) can improve wireless link performance by adjusting their boresight directions. However, existing RA studies generally assume instantaneous antenna reconfiguration, whereas mechanical rotation incurs non-negligible delay in practical deployment. To address this issue, we develop a rotation-delay-aware communication model for finite communication slots, where mechanical rotation directly reduces the time available for data transmission. This model reveals a fundamental tradeoff between the communication gain achieved through RA reorientation and the associated transmission-time loss. Accordingly, we formulate a rotation-delay-aware joint design of RA orientations and transmit beamforming to maximize the minimum effective transmission rate. For the single-user system, under a sufficient condition for strict concavity, the global optimum falls into one of three regimes: no rotation, partial rotation, and full rotation. A closed-form approximation is derived using a second-order expansion. For the multi-user system, we separate rotation-budget selection from fixed-budget max-min signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) optimization. An analytic-gradient zero-forcing (AG-ZF) algorithm is then developed for low-complexity joint RA orientation and rotation-budget optimization. The results show that explicitly accounting for mechanical rotation delay is essential for finite-slot RA-enabled UAV communications, and that the proposed designs effectively balance reconfiguration gain and transmission-time loss while achieving favorable effective-rate performance with low computational complexity.