The sky dims as rush hour churns through the city. Swarms of commuters scroll their mobile phones, gaming and streaming; driverless cars converge on the highway, trading signals with nearby vehicles and roadside units; while unmanned drones weave through the air, mapping the skies. A soft whirr, as small antennas glide along motorised tracks mounted between office windows, drifting across a tower’s façade. The ebb and flow of city life, powered by invisible signals pulsing back and forth.

At the heart of this futuristic impression is wireless networks as envisioned in a new study from Professor Zhang Rui from NUS Electrical and Computer Engineering and published in the journal, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.

The new approach to wireless base station architecture aims to raise network capacity and reliability. Leveraging movable antennas, an emerging technology with strong promise for the sixth generation (6G) network, the team simulated how base stations can be integrated into the urban landscape.

Why are movable antennas promising for 6G?

6G is the much-anticipated step up from our current fifth generation (5G) networks. It promises to deliver improved connectivity and support, which will be essential for emerging data-hungry applications such as artificial intelligence networks and automotive vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications.

Right now, traditional 5G antennas have fixed positions, limiting their coverage range. Movable antennas, on the other hand, can dynamically adjust their position or posture to improve receiving and transmitting signal intensities. This allows them to adapt to how user traffic changes over time.

Take an after-work crowd for example. A fixed antenna covering a carpark will stay locked in place, even when the carpark is empty. A movable antenna, on the other hand, can be programmed to automatically follow user flow from the carpark to the highway.

Peek inside a typical cellular base station used today and you will find tens – maybe hundreds – of fixed antennas packed into a neat grid. 5G multiplied the number of antennas used by previous generations in order to dramatically increase the amount of data a network can transmit within the same frequency band. In line with this strategy, some researchers have proposed crowding thousands of fixed antennas into a single base station for upcoming 6G networks.

But more antennas mean higher hardware costs and higher energy overheads. As it is, 5G networks are so power-hungry that telecom operators primarily limit their deployment to high-traffic hotspots, pointed out Zhang.

Movable antennas, however, offer higher network capacity while sidestepping the need for more antennas, which makes them an attractive option for 6G networks. Zhang and colleagues conceptualised how these wireless links can be optimised further, by fundamentally rethinking base station architecture and placing movable antennas closer to their target users.

In their paper, the team demonstrated mathematically how the placement of the movable antennas can be optimised in practical scenarios with uneven user distributions. Through analytical modelling, they also proved that movable antennas offer better performance with this new distributed base station design compared to fixed position antenna arrays, which are less adaptable.

Tomorrow’s wireless networks

It is already clear from the prevailing research that future 6G networks will use higher carrier frequencies, said Zhang, which means 6G antennas will be smaller and their signal loss over longer distances, higher. Wireless cells will shrink, making the team’s proposed design, which maximises aperture without raising antenna numbers, even more attractive.

Some forecasts suggest 6G could arrive as soon as 2030. The team’s ideas, however, may not materialise quite so early. Zhang noted that their proposal may be “futuristic,” but stressed that the work’s value is foundational: a theoretical proof that distributed, movable base stations can outperform state-of-the-art fixed arrays. With the potential gains clear on paper, perhaps industry appetite and engineering pathways will soon follow.