Enormous Fluid Antenna Systems (E-FAS) for Wireless Sensing: Channel Modeling and Conditional Estimation Limits

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a fundamental analytical framework for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) enabled by the Enormous Fluid Antenna System (E-FAS), which transforms a collection of coordinated intelligent surfaces into a gigantic reconfigurable electromagnetic aperture, with particular emphasis on the limits of angular sensing.We begin by developing a bidirectional sensing channel model that explicitly captures the complete sensing process, including surface-wave (SW) routing, distributed reradiation, target scattering, and echo propagation. Based on this channel model, we formulate a parametric observation model for target sensing and derive the associated Fisher information matrix (FIM) and Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for angular estimation. The analysis demonstrates that E-FAS gives rise to a fundamentally different sensing regime compared with conventional array-based and reconfigurable-surface-aided ISAC architectures. Our analysis uncovers that maximizing coherent routing gain does not necessarily maximize sensing performance, exposing a fundamental trade-off between SW routing gain and sensing diversity in programmable propagation environments. Numerical results validate the developed framework and demonstrate that E-FAS-enabled ISAC systems can achieve substantial angular sensing gains over conventional architectures under the same transmit-power budget. The results further underscore the importance of jointly optimizing propagation routing and sensing functionality, positioning E-FAS as a new paradigm for ISAC.