Fluid Antenna Systems under Channel Uncertainty and Hardware Impairments: Trends, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

Fluid antenna systems (FAS) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for achieving spatially reconfigurable, compact, and energy-efficient wireless communications in beyond fifth-generation (B5G) and sixth-generation (6G) networks. By dynamically repositioning a liquid-based radiating element within a confined physical structure, FAS can exploit spatial diversity without relying on multiple fixed antenna elements. This spatial mobility provides a new degree of freedom for mitigating channel fading and interference, while maintaining low hardware complexity and power consumption. However, the performance of FAS in realistic deployments is strongly affected by channel uncertainty, hardware nonidealities, and mechanical constraints, all of which can substantially deviate from idealized analytical assumptions. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the operation and design of FAS under such practical considerations. Key aspects include the characterization of spatio-temporal channel uncertainty, analysis of hardware and mechanical impairments such as RF nonlinearity, port coupling, and fluid response delay, as well as the exploration of robust design and learning-based control strategies to enhance system reliability. Finally, open research directions are identified, aiming to guide future developments toward robust, adaptive, and cross-domain FAS design for next-generation wireless networks.

Terahertz User-Centric Clustering in the Presence of Beam Misalignment

Beam misalignment is one of the main challenges for the design of reliable wireless systems in terahertz (THz) bands. This paper investigates how to apply user-centric base station (BS) clustering as a valuable add-on in THz networks. In particular, to reduce the impact of beam misalignment, a user-centric BS clustering design that provides multi-connectivity via BS cooperation is investigated. The coverage probability is derived by leveraging an accurate approximation of the aggregate interference distribution that captures the effect of beam misalignment and THz fading. The numerical results reveal the impact of beam misalignment with respect to crucial link parameters, such as the transmitter's beam width and the serving cluster size, demonstrating that user-centric BS clustering is a promising enabler of THz networks.

Copula-Based Modeling of RIS-Assisted Communications: Outage Probability Analysis

Statistical characterization of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assistedcommunications in the presence of phase noise is an important open issue. In this letter, we exploit the concept of copula modeling to capture the non-standard dependence features that appear due to the presence of discrete phase noise. In particular,we consider the outage probability of RIS systems in Rayleighfading channels and provide joint distributions to characterize the dependencies due to the use of finite resolution phase shifters at the RIS. Numerical assessments confirm the validity of closed-form expressions of the outage probability and motivate the use of bivariate copula for further RIS studies.