Rotatable Antenna Enabled Spectrum Sharing: Joint Antenna Orientation and Beamforming Design

Abstract

Conventional antenna arrays rely primarily on digital beamforming for spatial control. While adding more elements can narrow beamwidth and suppress interference, such scaling incurs prohibitive hardware and power costs. Rotatable antennas (RAs), which allow mechanical or electronic adjustment of element orientations, introduce a new degree of freedom to exploit spatial flexibility without enlarging the array. By dynamically optimizing orientations, RAs can substantially improve desired link alignment and interference suppression. This paper investigates RA-enabled multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channels under co-channel spectrum sharing and formulates a weighted sum-rate maximization problem that jointly optimizes transmit beamforming and antenna orientations. To tackle this nonconvex problem, we develop an alternating optimization (AO) framework that integrates weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE)-based beamforming with Frank-Wolfe-based orientation updates. To reduce complexity, we further study orientation optimization under maximum-ratio transmission (MRT) and zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming schemes. For finite-resolution actuators, we construct spherical Fibonacci codebooks and design a cross-entropy method (CEM)-based algorithm for discrete orientation selection. Simulations show that integrating RAs with conventional beamforming markedly increases weighted sum-rate, with gains rising with element directivity. Under discrete orientation control, the proposed CEM algorithm consistently outperforms the nearest-projection baseline.