Beyond Beamforming: Phase-and-Gain Channel Shaping via Rotatable Antenna Arrays

Xingxiang Peng, Qingqing Wu, Ziyuan Zheng, Wen Chen, Guangchi Zhang

This paper investigates geometry-reconfigurable transmission for multiuser communication systems enabled by a rotatable antenna array. In contrast to conventional fixed arrays, the proposed architecture jointly exploits array pose adjustment and element-level boresight steering, thereby reshaping both the array-induced phase responses and the direction-dependent channel gains. We formulate a weighted sum-rate maximization problem that jointly optimizes the transmit beamformers, array pose, and element boresights under practical visibility and steering constraints. To reveal the underlying design principles, we first provide a geometric interpretation via zero-forcing analysis, showing that the resulting rates stem from both channel-strength enhancement and spatial-separability improvement. Specifically, array-pose rotation improves inter-user channel orthogonality even with isotropic elements, whereas directional elements introduce a tradeoff between phase-based spatial separation and boresight-dependent gain alignment. Motivated by these insights, we develop an efficient optimization framework that jointly coordinates transmit beamforming, array-pose adaptation, and element-boresight steering to exploit the geometry-induced phase-and-gain channel-shaping capability. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed joint design outperforms fixed-array, pose-only, and boresight-only benchmarks, with larger gains achieved under more directive element patterns and tighter boresight-steering constraints.