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

In this letter, we propose a robust design for movable-antenna (MA) array enabled autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) 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 AAV deployment, transmit beamforming, and antennas’ positions. To solve this challenging problem, we propose a two-stage optimization strategy, where the AAV 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 AAV jittering and is superior to conventional systems based on fixed-position antennas (FPAs) with flexible beamforming.