Pinching Antennas-Assisted Sensing: A Ziv-Zakai Bound (ZZB) Perspective

The sensing capability of the pinching-antenna system (PASS) is analyzed from a Ziv-Zakai bound (ZZB) perspective, motivated by the sensing ambiguity arising from the multimodal observation model inherent to PASS. In comparison to other Bayesian sensing bounds, the ZZB provides a lower bound on the mean-squared error (MSE) across a broad range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and accounts for ambiguity in the likelihood functions. First, an observation model is developed for an uplink sensing scenario where a single sensing target transmits uplink pilots to a single-waveguide PASS receiver equipped with multiple pinching antennas (PAs). Building on this model, general ZZB expressions are derived for arbitrary prior distributions of the target's position, and are then specialized to the Gaussian and uniform cases. Second, the asymptotic ZZBs in low- and high-SNR regimes are characterized, and the relationship between the ZZBs and the conventional Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound (BCRB) is further studied by introducing the concept of an ambiguity function. Furthermore, to reduce the high computational complexity of direct evaluation of the ZZB, SNR-free and SNR-aware surrogate objective functions are proposed to facilitate ZZB-based optimization for enhancing sensing performance. Numerical results demonstrate that: i) Compared with the BCRB, the ZZB provides a tight sensing performance lower bound over a wide range of SNRs, ii) the ambiguity-awareness of the ZZB can address the multimodality-induced ambiguity in sensing, thereby yielding a reliable lower bound on the MSE, and iii) the proposed surrogate objective functions enable effective ZZB minimization with a lower computational complexity.

A Survey of Physical-layer Authentication Enhanced by Emerging Spatial Domain Technologies

This article surveys spatial-domain-enhanced Physical-layer Authentication (PLA), with Dual-polarized Antennas (DPA), Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) as the primary focus. With the rapid growth of wireless deployments, authentication mechanisms face stringent requirements for high security, low overhead, and low latency. PLA offers lightweight identity verification by exploiting physical-layer characteristics. However, the effectiveness of PLA critically depends on how physical observations are constructed and validated under wireless channels. Unlike existing surveys that mainly organize PLA by authentication modality, feature source, and evaluation metrics, this work emphasizes the connection between spatial-domain enhancement mechanisms, the resulting feature representation, and the authentication procedure. We review how DPA, Massive MIMO, and RIS reshape PLA feature representation, and we summarize newly introduced security threats along with representative defense strategies. Case studies further illustrate the practical impact, such as representative detection-probability trends across Signal-to-Noise Ratio regimes and quantitative comparisons among representative schemes. Finally, we outline promising future opportunities enabled by Dynamic Metasurface Antennas, Extra-large MIMO, and spatial configuration with artificial intelligence.

Beamforming Gain with Single-RF Movable Arrays

A single-radio-frequency (RF) movable array is investigated, in which all movable elements are driven by a single RF chain with equal amplitude and equal phase. The achievable beamforming gain enabled by antenna placement is analyzed. Linear beamforming gain scaling with the number of antennas is shown to be achievable in single-path channels, while coherent-combining conditions and aperture requirements are established for multipath channels. For multiuser transmission, the optimal max-min power allocation is derived in closed form, based on which an element-wise coordinate-search algorithm is developed for antenna placement design. Numerical results validate the analysis and reveal a fundamental tradeoff: beamforming gains can be achieved through antenna placement alone, but only at the expense of increased aperture resources.

Constrained Pinching Antenna Array Design for Sum-Rate Maximization in Multi-User PASS

Pinching antenna systems (PASS) have recently emerged as a promising architecture for flexible indoor wireless communications. However, most existing pinching antenna (PA) array designs for multi-user PASS either offer limited beam adaptation accuracy or require prohibitively high deployment cost. In this paper, we investigate a more practical constrained pinching antenna array (C-PAA)-assisted downlink PASS, where multiple PAs are grouped into a movable array and can be finely adjusted within the array at the wavelength scale. To improve the system spectral efficiency, a sum-rate maximization problem is formulated by jointly considering the array-center position and the fine-grained antenna distribution within the C-PAA. First, the structural properties of the C-PAA are characterized, and an explicit upper bound on the array aperture is derived. Then, tractable approximations for the effective channel gain and the achievable user rate are developed. Furthermore, the optimization problem of the multi-user sum-rate is analyzed, where the system sum-rate function is shown to exhibit a favorable unimodal behavior under practically relevant conditions, which enables an efficient one-dimensional search for the optimal C-PAA position. To further reduce the computational complexity, a closed-form approximate solution for the near-optimal array-center position is derived. Numerical results verify the accuracy of the developed analysis and demonstrate that the proposed C-PAA scheme closely approaches the ideal upper bound and significantly outperforms conventional fixed-spacing and existing PA array benchmarks.

Multi-/Uni-Cast Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access-Based INAC

With the rapid development of satellite communication and navigation, there is an urgent need to integrate both technologies to achieve reliable communication and precise navigation services within the same satellite system. By combining multi-/uni-cast (MUC) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technologies, we propose a novel MUC-NOMA-based integrated navigation and communication (INAC) signal structure, in which the navigation and communication signals share a common pseudo noise (PN) sequence, thereby integrating satellite communication and navigation at the signal level. According to different power allocation strategies, two scenarios are defined: multi-cast-oriented (MO-) INAC and uni-cast-oriented (UO-) INAC, where a greater portion of power is assigned to either the multi-cast or the uni-cast signal, respectively. To mitigate co-channel interference, we employ successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver and design a signal processing algorithm for the proposed INAC signal. Then, closed-form expressions are subsequently derived for the bit error rates (BER) of both the navigation and communication signals, along with the positioning accuracy of the navigation signal. To gain further insights, the impacts of power allocation factors and communication rates are evaluated. Our analysis results show that: i) In the MO-INAC scenario, the positioning and BER performance of navigation signal are excellent when more power is assigned to the multi-cast signal; ii) In the UO-INAC scenario, interference in the shared resources is reduced when more power is assigned to the uni-cast signal; iii) The ranging accuracy decreases as the communication data rate increases. Numerical results confirm the superior BER and positioning accuracy of the MO-INAC scenario for MEO satellites.

Integrated Positioning and Communications for PASS: A Robust Approach

The pinching-antenna systems (PASS), which dynamically activate and relocate the pinching-antennas (PAs) along the dielectric waveguide, offer unprecedented potential for integrated positioning and communication. The multi-waveguide-based uplink positioning approaches for indoor environments are first proposed in this paper, and the downlink communication performance is analyzed. Two possible scenarios, multi-waveguide single-PA (MWSP) and multi-waveguide multi-PA (MWMP), are considered under the assumptions of line-of-sight channels and a single, stationary user. For the MWSP scenario, the received signal strength indication (RSSI)-based ranging method and the MWSP-based least square (LS) positioning algorithm are developed. To gain deeper insights, a comprehensive error analysis of the LS positioning algorithm is conducted. Subsequently, for the MWMP scenario, the closed-form expression of the superposed signal is derived. According to the signal power, the MWMP-based grid search algorithm is proposed and the estimation error of proposed algorithm is analyzed. Then, based on the user's positioning result, the PAs are relocated to provide downlink communication service, and the achievable data rate of MWSP and MWMP scenarios are analyzed. Numerical results validate the correctness of our analysis, which show that: i) For the MWSP scenario, a smaller geometric dilution of precision (GDoP) leads to a lower average positioning error. Furthermore, even when the GDoP is large, the regions where the distances to PAs are nearly equal achieve the best accuracy. ii) For the MWMP scenario, non-parallel waveguide deployment improves positioning accuracy, although errors increase with the number of PAs. iii) The noise has a serious double-impact on data rate. There is a trade-off between positioning accuracy and communication performance.

Multimodal Learning for MIMO Beam Prediction Based on Variational Inference

Accurate beam prediction is essential for mitigating signalling overhead and latency in integrated sensing and communication-enabled massive multi-input multi-output systems. With the aid of multimodal learning, the prediction accuracy can be enhanced by leveraging the complementary information from other existing sensors, but the practical deployment is often constrained by the high cost of acquiring semantically aligned multimodal datasets. This paper proposes a variational-inference-based multimodal framework that decouples the optimization problem into modular feature extraction and cross-modal semantic alignment. Specifically, we develop a two-stage training strategy where the model utilises abundant unimodal data for representation learning before performing refined alignment on limited multimodal samples. This design enhances data efficiency and ensures robust feature fusion under sensing uncertainties. Experimental results on the DeepSense6G dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves competitive beam prediction accuracy and maintains high reliability, while only requiring 20% of the multimodal training data compared to conventional end-to-end benchmarks.

Joint Segment Activation and Antenna Placement for Uplink SWAN Systems

This article analyzes the achievable sum-rate of multiuser uplink segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna systems (SWANs). To unveil system-design insights, an upper bound on the achievable sum-rate is derived, based on which the existence of an optimal segment activation level is theoretically established. Motivated by this result, hybrid segment selection and aggregation (HSS/A) schemes are proposed to jointly optimize segment activation and pinching-antenna (PA) placement. Correspondingly, low-complexity greedy algorithms are developed for the considered optimization problem. Numerical results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate that the proposed HSS/A schemes outperform conventional full-segment aggregation.

Over-the-Air Computation via Segmented Waveguide-Enabled Pinching-Antenna Systems

A segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna system (SWAN)-assisted over-the-air computation (AirComp) framework is proposed. Three transmission architectures, namely segment selection (SS), phase-shifter-free segment aggregation (SA), and phase-shifter-enabled SA, are developed for uplink signal aggregation. For each architecture, low-complexity algorithms are developed to optimize the pinching-antenna placement and the per-segment phase shifts. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and the superiority of SWAN over the conventional pinching-antenna system (PASS). It is shown that both SS and SA achieve lower computation mean-squared error than the conventional PASS, while segment-wise phase control further improves the performance of SA.

Mutual Coupling-Aware Beamforming in Multi-User Continuous Aperture Array Systems

A mutual coupling-aware beamforming design for continuous aperture array (CAPA)-aided multi-user systems is investigated. First, a transmit coupling kernel is characterized to explicitly capture the mutual coupling effects inherent in CAPAs, based on which a mutual coupling-aware sum-rate maximization functional optimization problem is formulated. To address this problem, a kernel approximation (KA)-based weighted minimum mean-squared error (WMMSE) algorithm is developed. The optimal beamforming condition is derived within the WMMSE framework using the calculus of variations, while KA is employed to obtain a closed-form beamforming solution via wavenumber-domain Fourier transforms and Gauss-Legendre quadrature. Furthermore, the proposed framework is extended to CAPA-to-CAPA multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that: 1) the proposed algorithm achieves improved performance compared to benchmark schemes; 2) the modeled coupling effects are physically rational, where the performance of spatially discrete arrays converges to that of CAPAs; and 3) CAPA-to-CAPA MIMO systems can achieve higher degrees of freedom when the transceivers are placed in close proximity.