UAV Fluid-Antenna Channel Acquisition under Intra-Scan Channel Aging

RESUMO

Sequential sounding in UAV fluid-antenna systems (FASs) provides additional spatial information but delays transmission, causing earlier channel observations to age. This paper addresses the resulting information--freshness tradeoff by jointly determining where to probe and when to stop under blockwise hardware constraints. A dynamic Karhunen--Loève estimator aligns asynchronous measurements with the transmission state, covariance information gain selects feasible probe locations, and an age-discount identity with a local one-more-slot condition characterizes the covariance-level balance between information and freshness. Paired simulations show that temporal alignment recovers most of the lower-tail reliability lost by static stacking, covariance-aware probing ranks highest numerically among the evaluated policies, and optimized one-slot sounding becomes statistically competitive with two-slot alternatives at the highest tested mobility. Within the evaluated schedule family, increasing mobility shifts the competitive operating region toward shorter scans, supporting joint probe-placement and sounding-duration design.