Joint Transmitter and Receiver Design for Movable Antenna Enhanced Multicast Communications

Movable antenna (MA) is an emerging technology that utilizes localized antenna movement to achieve better channel conditions for enhancing communication performance. In this paper, we study the MA-enhanced multicast transmission from a base station equipped with multiple MAs to multiple groups of single-MA users. Our goal is to maximize the minimum weighted signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among all the users by jointly optimizing the position of each transmit/receive MA and the transmit beamforming. To tackle this challenging problem, we first consider the single-group scenario and propose an efficient algorithm based on the techniques of alternating optimization and successive convex approximation. Particularly, when optimizing transmit or receive MA positions, we construct a concave lower bound for the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of each user using only the second-order Taylor expansion, which simplifies the problem-solving process compared to the existing two-step approximation method. The proposed design is then extended to the general multi-group scenario. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm converges faster than the existing two-step approximation method, achieving a 3.4% enhancement in max-min SNR. Moreover, it can improve the max-min SNR/SINR by up to 22.5%, 181.7%, and 343.9% compared to benchmarks employing only receive MAs, only transmit MAs, and both transmit and receive FPAs, respectively.