How Many Independent Modes Does a Fluid Antenna Have? A Closed-Form Outage Analysis via Equivalent Degrees of Freedom

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wu, Tuo, Yao, Junteng, Wong, Kai-Kit, Tang, Jie, Elkashlan, Maged, Liu, Baiyang, Tong, Kin-Fai, Shin, Hyundong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Wu, Tuo
Yao, Junteng
Wong, Kai-Kit
Tang, Jie
Elkashlan, Maged
Liu, Baiyang
Tong, Kin-Fai
Shin, Hyundong
author_facet Wu, Tuo
Yao, Junteng
Wong, Kai-Kit
Tang, Jie
Elkashlan, Maged
Liu, Baiyang
Tong, Kin-Fai
Shin, Hyundong
contents In a fluid antenna system (FAS), a single reconfigurable antenna is able to activate one of $N$ correlated ports to exploit spatial diversity. However, outage analysis is challenging because exact evaluation requires an $N$-dimensional multivariate integral, while existing closed-form approximations based on block-correlation models tend to underestimate the true outage probability. This paper shows that the spatial correlation matrix of a FAS with a normalized linear aperture length $W$ has at most $K^{*}=2\lceil W\rceil+1$ significant eigenmodes, regardless of the number of deployed ports. This is a spatial counterpart of the Slepian-Landau-Pollak spectral concentration theorem and reveals that the spatial degrees of freedom are determined by aperture size rather than port count. Motivated by this result, we derive an \emph{equivalent degree of freedom} (EDoF) approximation, under which the outage probability can be expressed in closed form as that of selection combining over $K^{*}$ independent branches. We propose a refined \emph{weighted independent modes} (WIM) approximation, to incorporate eigenvalue-dependent branch weights $\{β_k\}$ and yield a product-form closed-form expression with improved accuracy at moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Both approximations achieve the exact diversity order, become asymptotically exact at high SNR, and provably never underestimate the true outage probability by Anderson's inequality. The proposed framework is further extended to obtain closed-form expressions for ergodic capacity, characterize multi-user fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA) with explicit interference-limited outage floors. Besides, we analyze two-dimensional planar FAS, for which the diversity order scales multiplicatively with the aperture dimensions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_19612
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Many Independent Modes Does a Fluid Antenna Have? A Closed-Form Outage Analysis via Equivalent Degrees of Freedom
Wu, Tuo
Yao, Junteng
Wong, Kai-Kit
Tang, Jie
Elkashlan, Maged
Liu, Baiyang
Tong, Kin-Fai
Shin, Hyundong
Signal Processing
In a fluid antenna system (FAS), a single reconfigurable antenna is able to activate one of $N$ correlated ports to exploit spatial diversity. However, outage analysis is challenging because exact evaluation requires an $N$-dimensional multivariate integral, while existing closed-form approximations based on block-correlation models tend to underestimate the true outage probability. This paper shows that the spatial correlation matrix of a FAS with a normalized linear aperture length $W$ has at most $K^{*}=2\lceil W\rceil+1$ significant eigenmodes, regardless of the number of deployed ports. This is a spatial counterpart of the Slepian-Landau-Pollak spectral concentration theorem and reveals that the spatial degrees of freedom are determined by aperture size rather than port count. Motivated by this result, we derive an \emph{equivalent degree of freedom} (EDoF) approximation, under which the outage probability can be expressed in closed form as that of selection combining over $K^{*}$ independent branches. We propose a refined \emph{weighted independent modes} (WIM) approximation, to incorporate eigenvalue-dependent branch weights $\{β_k\}$ and yield a product-form closed-form expression with improved accuracy at moderate signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Both approximations achieve the exact diversity order, become asymptotically exact at high SNR, and provably never underestimate the true outage probability by Anderson's inequality. The proposed framework is further extended to obtain closed-form expressions for ergodic capacity, characterize multi-user fluid antenna multiple access (FAMA) with explicit interference-limited outage floors. Besides, we analyze two-dimensional planar FAS, for which the diversity order scales multiplicatively with the aperture dimensions.
title How Many Independent Modes Does a Fluid Antenna Have? A Closed-Form Outage Analysis via Equivalent Degrees of Freedom
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19612