HARQ for Slow Fluid Antenna Multiple Access

Abstract

Slow fluid antenna multiple access (sFAMA), enabled by the fluid antenna system (FAS), has recently emerged as a practical and low-complexity paradigm for supporting massive wireless connectivity. While existing studies have characterized its physical-layer performance under one-shot transmission, its interaction with retransmission protocols and the resulting networking performance remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we study a downlink hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ)-assisted sFAMA framework, termed HARQ-sFAMA, in which each user performs distinguished port selection in every HARQ round and combines the received signals across multiple rounds to improve decoding reliability. We develop a comprehensive analytical framework to characterize the outage probability, average packet waiting time, and energy efficiency of the proposed system. The analysis reveals how HARQ exploits the spatial reconfigurability of FAS to simultaneously enhance reliability and improve queueing performance. Numerical results corroborate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate that the HARQ-sFAMA system significantly outperforms conventional one-shot sFAMA in terms of reliability, delay, and energy efficiency. These findings suggest that the integration of HARQ and sFAMA provides a promising pathway toward a practical and standards-compatible massive access solution for future wireless networks.