48. Non-Uniform Antenna Arrays and Movable Antennas

Antenna arrays are used everywhere to enhance the wireless signal quality through beamforming and aperture gains. A common practice is to arrange antennas uniformly along a line or in a rectangle, but this is not necessarily the preferred arrangement. In this episode, Emil Björnson and Erik G. Larsson discuss how the geometry of an antenna array affects the shape of the beams it can transmit and the ability to spatially multiplex many users. They uncover how uniform arrays excel at packing many antennas into a compact space, while adjacent antennas collect redundant information about the world around us. In future systems operating above 6 GHz, we might not be able to afford to fill the aperture with antennas and can instead place them in a sparse non-uniform pattern. The vision is to optimize the arrangement at each base station site to maximize its communication and/or sensing performance. The conversation covers grating lobes, minimum redundancy arrays, preoptimized irregular arrays, and movable/fluid antenna systems. Further details can be found in “From Antenna Abundance to Antenna Intelligence in 6G Gigantic MIMO Systems”, https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.08326 Music: On the Verge by Joseph McDade. Visit Erik’s website https://liu.se/en/employee/erila39 and Emil’s website https://ebjornson.com/