Multiuser Communications with Movable-Antenna Base Station: Joint Antenna Positioning, Receive Combining, and Power Control

Movable antenna (MA) is an emerging technology which enables a local movement of the antenna in the transmitter/receiver region for improving the channel condition and communication performance. In this paper, we study the deployment of multiple MAs at the base station (BS) for enhancing the multiuser communication performance. First, we model the multiuser channel in the uplink to characterize the wireless channel variation due to MAs' movements at the BS. Then, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum achievable rate among multiple users for MA-aided uplink multiuser communications by jointly optimizing the MAs' positions, their receive combining at the BS, and the transmit power of users, under the constraints of finite moving region for MAs, minimum inter-MA distance, and maximum transmit power of each user. To solve this challenging non-convex optimization problem, a two-loop iterative algorithm is proposed by leveraging the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method. Specifically, the outer-loop updates the positions of a set of particles, where each particle's position represents one realization of the antenna position vector (APV) of all MAs. The inner-loop implements the fitness evaluation for each particle in terms of the max-min achievable rate of multiple users with its corresponding APV, where the receive combining matrix of the BS and the transmit power of each user are optimized by applying the block coordinate descent (BCD) technique. Simulation results show that the antenna position optimization for MAs-aided BSs can significantly improve the rate performance as compared to conventional BSs with fixed-position antennas (FPAs).