UAV Rotatable Antenna under Rotation Delay

@misc{xie2026rotatable,
  title = {{UAV Rotatable Antenna under Rotation Delay}},
  author = {Yinmei Xie and Chiya Zhang and Chunlong He and Weizheng Zhang and Wei Wang},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.22777},
  eprint = {2610.22777},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22777},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - UAV Rotatable Antenna under Rotation Delay
AU  - Yinmei Xie
AU  - Chiya Zhang
AU  - Chunlong He
AU  - Weizheng Zhang
AU  - Wei Wang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/16
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.22777
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22777
AB  - 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.
ER  -