Polarization-aware Reconfigurable Antenna Aided Wireless Communications

Reconfigurable antennas (RAs) have emerged as a promising technology for future wireless networks, offering additional flexibility for wireless communications. Among existing designs, rotatable antennas are particularly effective in improving directional gain via boresight alignment only. However, conventional rotatable RAs often overlook a critical physical coupling: the mechanical rotation inevitably alters the radiated polarization orientation, potentially leading to polarization mismatch. To address this challenge, we investigate a novel RA architecture that simultaneously supports 3D rotation and polarization state reconfiguration, ensuring alignment in both spatial and polarization domains. To quantify the performance gains, we analyze a simplified single-user LoS scenario to compare the optimized rotatable design against a fixed scheme. This analysis attributes the performance improvement to three aspects: directional and projection gain arising from boresight steering, polarization direction alignment gain enabled by roll adjustment, and polarization state matching gain provided by polarization reconfiguration. Furthermore, for general multipath multi-user systems, we formulate a joint power minimization problem by optimizing digital beamforming alongside rotation and polarization designs, subject to rate and hardware constraints. To solve the resulting non-convex problem efficiently, we develop an alternating optimization framework, where the digital beamforming is solved via semidefinite relaxation and difference-of-convex techniques, while the rotation and polarization designs are updated using Riemannian conjugate gradient on their respective manifolds. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RA outperforms both rotation-only and boresight-only benchmarks, achieving lower transmit power under the same rate constraints by joint spatial-polarization design.