QUARTO · Quantum Annealing for Fluid Antenna MIMO Systems

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology transformed wireless communications. However, the extreme requirements of the envisioned 6G services and the highly complex and dynamic radio environments of next-generation wireless networks call for better exploitation of the spatial channel dynamics and adaptation to rapid channel variations. Fluid antenna systems (FAS) have been recently proposed in response to these issues. They leverage liquid antennas whose position can be adjusted in real-time to enhance reconfigurability and, therefore, improve capacity, reliability, energy harvesting, and interference management. Nevertheless, antenna positions optimization is a particularly challenging problem that cannot be efficiently tacked by conventional means, especially given the excess of possible positions required to unlock FAS potential. Quantum computing alleviates this processing bottleneck. Based on the above, QUARTO Proof-of-Concept (PoC) aims at developing and validating through D-WAVE experimentation a novel FAS-based and Quantum Annealing (QA)-enabled MIMO communication paradigm. QUARTO focuses on establishing the effectiveness of a proposed pre-processing technique for large-scale quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems, experimentally validating the QA-based antenna configuration solution for FAS-based MIMO systems, demonstrating its benefits in comparison to the state of the art, and exploring its commercial potential. The project will benchmark the pre-processing technique on classical graph problems, such as MaxCut, scaling from 100 up to 2,000 variables, and will test the QA-based solution on MIMO configurations with up to 100 liquid antennas and ports.The proposed solution provides new R&D directions in quantum computing and 6G wireless communication technologies. By integrating QA with FAS-based MIMO systems, QUARTO aims to deliver superior performance and pave the way for future technological breakthroughs.