Fluid Antenna-Aided Noise Modulation: Spatial Diversity for Variance-Based Wireless Communication

Abstract

Noise modulation (NoiseMod) encodes information in the \emph{variance} of a transmitted noise-like waveform rather than in its amplitude, phase, or frequency, and is attractive for ultra-low-power and covert links. Its main weakness is that, unlike classical modulation, it exhibits \emph{no} diversity under Rayleigh fading: its bit error probability (BEP) decays only as $1/(N_s\delta)$, where $N_s$ is the number of noise samples per bit and $\delta$ the useful-to-thermal noise variance ratio. Independently, fluid antenna systems (FAS) have been shown to recover substantial selection diversity from a single radiating element that switches among $N_p$ closely spaced ports, without extra radio-frequency chains. This paper combines the two: we equip a NoiseMod receiver with a fluid antenna and derive its average BEP. For idealized, mutually independent ports, we obtain an exact closed-form BEP via order statistics of the port envelopes. For the physically accurate, spatially correlated case governed by Jake's model, we build a semi-analytical BEP using the two-stage channel approximation of Khammassi \emph{et al.} We validate both regimes against full signal-level Monte Carlo simulation and show that (i) FAS restores a diversity order that grows with the number of ports $N_p$ when ports are weakly correlated, (ii) this gain saturates once the fluid-antenna aperture $W\lambda$ is fixed and $N_p$ grows, mirroring the outage-probability saturation reported for FAS, now observed for BEP, and (iii) an intrinsic, correlation-independent (and $\delta$-independent) BEP floor set only by $N_s$ and the variance ratio $\alpha$ persists regardless of the antenna diversity order.