Antenna Orientation Optimization for Rotatable Antenna-Enabled ISAC Systems
Abstract
Non-fixed flexible antenna architectures, such as fluid antenna system (FAS), movable antenna (MA), and pinching antenna, have garnered significant interest in recent years. In this paper, we deploy a rotatable antenna (RA) array at the base station (BS) to improve the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) performance by exploiting the additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) introduced by antenna rotation. To enhance the sensing performance over an extended region containing a potential target while meeting the communication requirements of multiple users, we aim to maximize the minimum echo signal power within the sensing region, subject to required minimum communication rates of the users. For the special case of a single user and a point target, we develop a tractable approximation of the original problem, leading to independent per-RA subproblems. We characterize the geometric structure of these subproblems and derive closed-form solutions. Under the far-field approximation, the per-RA subproblems become approximately identical, allowing a common pointing vector to be adopted for all RAs. For the general multi-user and regional sensing case, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm that alternately optimizes the transmit beamforming for communication, the covariance matrix of the probing signal, and the pointing vectors of the RAs in an iterative manner. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RA-enabled ISAC system significantly outperforms various benchmark schemes with restricted antenna-orientation flexibility, while the evaluation of the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) further verifies its benefits for target-position estimation accuracy.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{wu2026antenna,
title = {{Antenna Orientation Optimization for Rotatable Antenna-Enabled ISAC Systems}},
author = {Qingjie Wu and Beixiong Zheng and Guangchi Zhang and Robert Schober},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2606.31466},
eprint = {2606.31466},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31466},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Antenna Orientation Optimization for Rotatable Antenna-Enabled ISAC Systems
AU - Qingjie Wu
AU - Beixiong Zheng
AU - Guangchi Zhang
AU - Robert Schober
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2606.31466
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.31466
AB - Non-fixed flexible antenna architectures, such as fluid antenna system (FAS), movable antenna (MA), and pinching antenna, have garnered significant interest in recent years. In this paper, we deploy a rotatable antenna (RA) array at the base station (BS) to improve the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) performance by exploiting the additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) introduced by antenna rotation. To enhance the sensing performance over an extended region containing a potential target while meeting the communication requirements of multiple users, we aim to maximize the minimum echo signal power within the sensing region, subject to required minimum communication rates of the users. For the special case of a single user and a point target, we develop a tractable approximation of the original problem, leading to independent per-RA subproblems. We characterize the geometric structure of these subproblems and derive closed-form solutions. Under the far-field approximation, the per-RA subproblems become approximately identical, allowing a common pointing vector to be adopted for all RAs. For the general multi-user and regional sensing case, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm that alternately optimizes the transmit beamforming for communication, the covariance matrix of the probing signal, and the pointing vectors of the RAs in an iterative manner. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RA-enabled ISAC system significantly outperforms various benchmark schemes with restricted antenna-orientation flexibility, while the evaluation of the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) further verifies its benefits for target-position estimation accuracy.
ER -