Robust Design for Movable-Antenna Array Enabled UAV Communications With Jittering

• Published in: IEEE wireless communications letters p. 1
• Main Authors: Mao, Haobin, Zhu, Lipeng, Pi, Xiangyu, Xiao, Zhenyu, Xia, Xiang-Gen, Zhang, Rui
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2025
• Subjects: antenna position optimization; Antennas; Array signal processing; Autonomous aerial vehicles; beamforming; Movable antenna (MA); Optimization; Resource management; robust optimization; Robustness; Training; Transmitting antennas; Uncertainty; unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications; Vectors
• ISSN: 2162-2337; 2162-2345
• DOI: 10.1109/LWC.2025.3595114

In this letter, we propose a robust design for movable-antenna (MA) array enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications with imperfect angle-of-departure (AoD) information of air-to-ground channels induced by jittering effects. Specifically, to guarantee fairness, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the worst-case minimum achievable rate over all users by optimizing the UAV deployment, transmit beamforming, and antennas' positions. To solve this challenging problem, we propose a two-stage optimization strategy, where the UAV deployment is first designed under the assumption of ideal beam patterns to decouple the directional beamforming design from the original problem, and then the transmit beamforming and MAs' positions are jointly optimized via a cutting set method-based algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed MA-based design can effectively enhance the system robustness against AoD uncertainties in air-to-ground channels caused by UAV jittering and is superior to conventional systems based on fixed-position antennas (FPAs) with flexible beamforming.