Polarforming for Wireless Communications: Modeling and Performance Analysis

This paper presents, for the first time, the concept of \textit{polarforming} for wireless communications. Polarforming refers to a novel technique that enables dynamic adjustment of antenna polarization using reconfigurable polarized antennas (RPAs). It can fully leverage polarization diversity to improve the performance of wireless communication systems by aligning the effective polarization state of the incoming electromagnetic (EM) wave with the antenna polarization. To better demonstrate the benefits of polarforming, we propose a general RPA-aided system that allows for tunable antenna polarization. A wavefront-based channel model is developed to properly capture depolarization behaviors in both line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) channels. Based on this model, we provide a detailed description of transmit and receive polarforming on planes of polarization (PoPs). We also evaluate the performance gains provided by polarforming under stochastic channel conditions. Specifically, we derive a closed-form expression for the relative signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gain compared to conventional fixed-polarization antenna (FPA) systems and approximate the cumulative distribution function (CDF) for the RPA system. Our analysis reveals that polarforming offers a diversity gain of two, indicating full utilization of polarization diversity for dual-polarized antennas. Furthermore, extensive simulation results validate the effectiveness of polarforming and exhibit substantial improvements over conventional FPA systems. The results also indicate that polarforming not only can combat depolarization effects caused by wireless channels but also can overcome channel correlation when scattering is insufficient.