UAV Swarm Enabled Aerial Movable Antenna System for Low-Altitude Economy: From Far-Field to Near-Field Communication

2026-02-14

AI Summary

This work addresses the inadequacy of conventional far-field uniform plane wave models in accurately characterizing near-field channels between ultra-large-scale unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) antenna arrays and ground users. To overcome this limitation, the paper proposes a cooperative near-field reconfigurable intelligent surface system based on UAV swarms, employing a non-uniform spherical wave model to precisely capture near-field channel characteristics. A symmetric dual-user interference-free deployment architecture is introduced, and closed-form solutions for optimal single- and dual-UAV placements are derived through joint optimization of three-dimensional flight trajectories and receive beamforming. An efficient solution is obtained via successive convex approximation and alternating optimization algorithms. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly enhances the minimum average communication rate for ground users, thereby validating the effectiveness and superiority of the near-field cooperative design.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Humans and AI: Planning and Decision Support for Human-Machine Teams
• Search and Optimization: Non-convex Optimization

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: On-Device user modeling, personalization, and recommendation
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Experiences and lessons learnt from Web-based algorithms and system deployments
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with the intrinsic three-dimensional (3D) mobility provides an ideal platform for implementing aerial movable antenna (AMA) system enabled by UAV swarm cooperation. Besides, AMA system is readily to achieve an extremely large-scale array aperture, rendering the conventional far-field uniform plane wave (UPW) model no longer valid for aerial-to-ground links. This paper studies the UAV swarm enabled near-field AMA communication, by taking into account the non-uniform spherical wave (NUSW) model, where UAV swarm trajectory simultaneously influences the channel amplitude and phase. We formulate a general optimization problem to maximize the minimum average communication rate over user equipments (UEs), by jointly optimizing the 3D UAV swarm trajectory and receive beamforming for all UEs. To draw useful insights, the special case of single UE is first studied, and successive convex approximation (SCA) technique is proposed to efficiently optimize the UAV swarm trajectory. For the special case of placement optimization, the optimal placement positions of UAVs for cases of single UAV and two UAVs are derived in closed-form. Then, for the special case of two UEs, we show that an inter-UE interference (IUI)-free communication can be achieved by symmetrically placing an even number of UAVs along a hyperbola, with its foci corresponding to the locations of the two UEs. Furthermore, for arbitrary number of UEs, an alternating optimization algorithm is proposed to efficiently tackle the non-convex optimization problem. Numerical results validate the significant performance gains over the benchmark schemes.

Problem

• UAV swarm
• movable antenna system
• near-field communication
• non-uniform spherical wave
• low-altitude economy

Innovation

• UAV swarm
• near-field communication
• movable antenna system
• non-uniform spherical wave
• trajectory optimization