RIS CUTTING EDGE FOURM
Rotatable Antenna for 6G: Bridging Intelligence in Communication and Sensing
可转向天线——智联6G通感未来
Rotatable Antenna for 6G: Bridging Intelligence in Communication and Sensing
- RISTA CUTTING EDGE FORUM Season 4 Session 16
- Time：8pm-9pm, September 16th, 2025.
- Speaker guest：Prof.Beixiong Zheng
- Chair guest：Prof.Jie Xu
Rotatable Antenna (RA) is a novel antenna architecture that offers significant potential to enhance wireless sensing and communication performance by dynamically adjusting the boresight of directional antennas. Compared with traditional fixed-antenna architectures, RA can flexibly reconfigure its boresight direction via mechanical or electronic means, thereby unlocking additional spatial degrees of freedom to improve channel conditions, expand coverage, mitigate interference, and enhance sensing accuracy. This report systematically introduces RA technology, covering its hardware architecture and application prospects, and highlights its advantages on interference avoidance, coverage extension, and target sensing. The report also discusses key design challenges in RA systems, including scanning scheduling, channel estimation, boresight optimization, and RA configuration. Moreover, a prototype of RA system is presented (Best Demo Award from IEEE/CIC ICCC), which has successfully demonstrated its effectiveness in detecting and tracking UAV targets. With its low-cost advantage, the prototype provides an economical and efficient implementation pathway for integrated sensing and communication in low-altitude economy scenarios. Leveraging its unique capabilities in flexible antenna/array rotation to adapt to various communication and sensing requirements under dynamic channel conditions, RA is poised to become a key enabler of future intelligent, reliable, and agile wireless networks in the 6G era.
Beixiong Zheng is an associate professor and master/doctoral supervisor at the School of Microelectronics, South China University of Technology. He has been awarded the Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers and was selected for the National Overseas Talent Introduction Program and the Guangdong Province Major Talent Program. In addition, he was recognized as a Highly Cited Chinese Researcher by Elsevier in 2024 and has been listed among the World’s Top 2% Scientists from 2021 to 2024. Dr. Zheng currently serves as a Lead Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), and an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (TWC) and IEEE Communications Letters (CL). He has recently pioneered the concept of Rotatable Antenna (RA) technology. To date, he has published over 70 IEEE journal papers (including 35 as first/corresponding author) and 27 IEEE conference papers (including 14 as first author), with more than 11,000 Google Scholar citations. He is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards, including the IEEE Communications Society Heinrich Hertz Award for Best Communications Letter, the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award, the First Prize of the Science and Technology Award of Guangdong Communications Society, the First Prize of the Electronic Information Science and Technology Award of Guangdong Province, the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award from the China Education Society of Electronics, the Best Demo Award from IEEE/CIC ICCC, and multiple Best Paper Awards from IEEE ICNC/WCSP/Ucom.
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