Wideband Pixel-Based Fluid Antenna System: An Antenna Design for Smart City

Smart cities demand versatile antenna systems supporting heterogeneous wireless applications across diverse propagation environments. This article presents a wideband pixel-based fluid antenna system (PB-FAS) designed as a general-purpose antenna solution for smart city infrastructures, addressing fundamental challenges in wideband operation, spatial adaptability, interference mitigation, and scalable deployment. The proposed PB-FAS integrates parasitic elements for enhanced bandwidth (6.0–7.0 GHz) and a compact six-p-i-n-diode pixel surface enabling 64 distinct fluid states, achieving optimal cost-performance balance. An integrated FPGA-based control system provides microsecond-level reconfiguration for real-time channel adaptation. We establish a rigorous exact spatial geometry (ESG) channel model capturing state-dependent antenna responses across near-field and far-field regions, providing a unified theoretical foundation for interference mitigation analysis. Comprehensive validation through full-wave electromagnetic simulations, anechoic chamber measurements, and experimental two-source 16-QAM communication tests demonstrates up to 11-dB signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) improvement and 13.2% error vector magnitude (EVM) reduction through hardware-level spatial diversity, confirming the system’s effectiveness as a scalable, cost-effective solution for next-generation smart city wireless infrastructures ranging from Internet of Things (IoT) sensor networks to high-capacity backhaul links.