English

Artificial Intelligence for Spatially Reconfigurable Antennas: Movable, Fluid, and Pinching Antenna Systems

Signal Processing 2026-07-31 v1

Abstract

Recently, sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks have moved beyond fixed-array designs toward antenna architectures that can adapt their spatial configuration to specific environmental conditions. Movable antenna, fluid antenna, and pinching antenna systems represent this principle in different ways, but they share a common vision: exploiting spatial flexibility as an additional degree of freedom (DoF) to improve communication, sensing, security, and resource efficiency. These new techniques, however, also bring challenging problems, as antenna configuration must be jointly considered with channel acquisition, beamforming, mobility, and network resource management. Therefore, artificial intelligence (AI) has become an important tool for learning fast and adaptive control policies for these highly coupled systems. In this survey, we provide a unified review of AI for spatially reconfigurable antenna systems. We first introduce the basic principles of movable, fluid, and pinching antennas, which is followed by a summary of the latest AI-enabled designs according to their primary optimization objectives. Furthermore, we compare the roles of deep learning (DL), deep reinforcement learning (DRL), multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), graph learning, Transformers, large language models (LLMs), and structure-guided learning across different antenna architectures. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future directions toward scalable, robust, and hardware-aware intelligent reconfigurable antenna networks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2608.00255,
  title  = {Artificial Intelligence for Spatially Reconfigurable Antennas: Movable, Fluid, and Pinching Antenna Systems},
  author = {Nguyen Cong Luong and Zeping Sui and Thai-Hoc Vu and Jie Cao and Bo Ma and Thuan Van Le and Xunyang Zhan and Nguyen Duc Hai and Min Xu and Qiushi Zhao and Dong In Kim and Yonghong Zeng and Shaohan Feng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.00255},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

30 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE COMST