Be Water, My Antennas: Riding on Radio Wave Fluctuation in Nature for Spatial Multiplexing using Programmable Meta-Fluid Antenna

Abstract

Interference and scattering, often deemed undesirable, are inevitable in wireless communications, especially when the current mobile networks and upcoming sixth generation (6G) have turned into ultra-dense networks. Current approaches relying on multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) combined with artificial-intelligence-aided (AI) signal processing have drawbacks of being power-hungry and requiring wide bandwidth that raise scalability concerns. In this article, we take a radical approach and utilize the channel fading phenomenon to our advantage. Specifically, we propose a novel meta-fluid antenna architecture, referred to as the `fluid' antenna system (FAS), that can freely surf on radio wave fluctuations, like `fluid' figuratively speaking, with fine resolution in space to opportunistically avoid interference, eliminating the need for expensive signal processing. Our experimental results demonstrate that under rich scattering conditions, the proposed meta-fluidic architecture is able to exploit the natural ups and downs of radio waves in space for spatial multiplexing. These breakthrough results show that scattering can be desirable not harmful and interference can be dodged not suppressed, fundamentally changing our perception of fading and our understanding on how interference should be managed in wireless communications networks.