Flexible Beamforming Design with Two-layer Rotatable Antenna: Synergizing Array and Antenna Rotations

Abstract

Reconfigurable antenna technology, such as movable antennas (MAs) and rotatable antennas (RAs), has emerged as a promising solution to enhance wireless communication performance by exploiting new degrees of freedom (DoFs) in antenna reconfiguration. However, existing RA designs mostly consider array-wise or antenna-wise rotation only, limiting their potential in wide-range radiation pattern control. To overcome this, we propose a new two-layer RA architecture for downlink coverage improvement, which combines array-wise rotation for global orientation adjustment with per-antenna rotation for fine-grained radiation refinement. We then formulate an optimization problem to maximize the minimum beamforming gain over a target region by jointly optimizing the two-layer rotations and transmit beamforming. To solve this non-convex problem, an efficient block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm is proposed, which alternately optimizes one of the three variables in an iterative manner, with the other two being fixed. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed two-layer RA significantly improves the minimum beamforming gain over fixed antenna arrays and single-layer RAs.