Skip-Enabled LMMSE-based Channel Estimation for Large-Scale Fluid Antenna-Enabled Cellular Networks

The concept of reconfigurable fluid antennas (FAs) is a potential and promising solution to enhance the spectral efficiency of wireless communication networks. Despite their many advantages, FA-enabled communications require a significant amount of spectral resources in order to select the most desirable position of the radiating element from a large number of prescribed locations. In this paper, we present an analytical framework for the outage performance of large-scale FA-enabled communications under limited coherence interval scenario. Under this framework, we propose a novel sequential linear minimum mean-squared error-based channel estimation method, that is performed for a limited number of FA ports, followed by data reception from the port with the strongest estimated channel. A complete analytical framework in terms of the outage probability is developed by using tools from stochastic geometry. Our results reveal that the proposed technique can provide significant performance gains, especially for FAs with a large number of ports.