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.

Optimal Analog Beamforming and Power Allocation for Multiuser TDMA Systems

The joint design of analog beamforming and power allocation is investigated for a single radio-frequency chain multiuser time-division multiple access system under a max-min signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) criterion. A hardware-efficient phased-array architecture is considered, where the beamforming vector is shared by all users and is subject to constant-modulus constraints. For any fixed analog beamformer, the optimal power allocation is first derived in closed form, by which the original problem is reduced to phase-shift optimization only. Then, globally optimal branch-and-bound (BB) algorithms are developed for discrete and continuous phase shifts. Numerical results show that the proposed BB algorithms achieve the global optimum and provide reliable benchmarks for evaluating the performance gap of low-complexity alternating-optimization methods.

Transmit Pinching-Antenna Systems (T-PASS): Connecting Wired to Wireless Communications

A transmit pinching-antenna system (T-PASS) framework is proposed, in which a single pinched waveguide is employed to jointly serve one wired user equipment (UE) and multiple wireless UEs. The signal radiated by the pinching antennas (PAs) is used to serve the wireless UEs, whereas the residual guided signal at the waveguide termination is used to serve the wired UE. To facilitate T-PASS transmission and mitigate inter-user interference, a hybrid non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme is introduced. Wireless UEs are scheduled by time-division multiple access (TDMA), and, in each slot, the scheduled wireless UE is paired with the wired UE through power-domain NOMA. Within this framework, the PA positions, PA radiation coefficients, power allocation, and TDMA time-slot allocation are jointly optimized to maximize a weighted sum rate (WSR). i) For the two-user case with one wired UE and one wireless UE, the optimal PA position and successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding order are derived. Closed-form optimal power allocation is obtained, and a near-optimal PA radiation coefficient is determined through a low-complexity one-dimensional search. ii) For the multiuser case with one wired UE and multiple wireless UEs, four protocols with different PA-position and PA-radiation configurations are proposed. For each protocol, a low-complexity element-wise alternating optimization algorithm is developed to optimize the PA positions and radiation coefficients, while closed-form solutions are derived for the optimal power allocation and time-slot allocation. Numerical results are presented to show that: i) under typical T-PASS configurations, the wired UE is selected as the strong user in the optimal SIC decoding order; ii) the proposed T-PASS framework achieves a significantly higher WSR than conventional wireless-only PASS.

Exploiting Segmented Waveguide-Enabled Pinching-Antenna Systems (SWANs) for Uplink Tri-Hybrid Beamforming

A segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna system (SWAN)-based tri-hybrid beamforming architecture is proposed for uplink multi-user MIMO communications, which jointly optimizes digital, analog, and pinching beamforming. Both fully-connected (FC) and partially-connected (PC) structures between RF chains and segment feed points are considered. For the FC architecture, tri-hybrid beamforming is optimized using the weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE) and zero-forcing (ZF) approaches. Specifically, the digital, analog, and pinching beamforming components are optimized via a closed-form solution, Riemannian manifold optimization, and a Gauss-Seidel search, respectively. For the PC architecture, an interleaved topology tailored to the SWAN receiver is proposed, in which segments assigned to each RF chain (sub-array) are interleaved with those from other sub-arrays. Based on this structure, a WMMSE-based tri-hybrid design is developed, in which the Riemannian-manifold update used for the FC structure is replaced by element-wise phase calibration to exploit sparsity in analog beamforming. To gain insight into the performance of the proposed system, the rate-scaling laws with respect to the number of segments are derived for both the FC and PC structures. Our results demonstrate that: i)~SWAN with the proposed tri-hybrid beamforming consistently outperforms conventional hybrid beamforming and conventional pinching-antenna systems with pinching beamforming for both the FC and PC structures; and ii)~the PC structure can strike a good balance between sum rate and energy consumption when the number of segments is large; and iii) the achievable rate does not necessarily increase with the number of segments.

Continuous-Aperture Array-Based ISAC Over Fading Channels

A framework of continuous-aperture array (CAPA)-based integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) under a fading communication channel is proposed. A continuous operator-based signal model is developed, and the statistics of the communication channel gain are characterized via Landau's eigenvalue theorem. On this basis, the performance of the CAPA-based ISAC system is analyzed by considering three continuous beamforming designs: i) the sensing-centric (S-C) design that optimizes sensing performance, ii) the communication-centric (C-C) design that optimizes communication performance, and iii) the Pareto-optimal design that balances the sensing-communication trade-off. For the S-C and C-C design, closed-form expressions for the sensing rate (SR), ergodic communication rate (CR), and outage probability are derived, and high-signal-to-noise ratio asymptotic analysis is conducted to obtain the multiplexing and diversity gains. For the Pareto-optimal design, the Pareto-optimal beamformer achieving the Pareto boundary is derived, and the achievable SR-CR region is characterized. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed CAPA-ISAC scheme outperforms both conventional spatially discrete arrays-based ISAC and CAPA-based frequency-division sensing and communications.

Pinching Antennas for Multiple Access in Multigroup Multicast Communications

This paper aims to design multiple access (MA) schemes to improve the max-min fairness (MMF) for pinching antennas (PAs)-based multigroup multicast communications, where PA placement and resource allocation are jointly optimized. Specifically, three MA schemes are considered to facilitate the multicast transmission: i) treating interference as noise (TIN), ii) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and iii) time-division multiple access (TDMA) with two PA reconfiguration protocols, namely pinching switching (PS) and pinching multiplexing (PM). i) For TIN, a closed-form solution is derived for optimal power allocation, while a sequential element-wise optimization (SEO) is developed for the PA placement. ii) For NOMA, a recursive power allocation framework incorporating a bisection search is developed, and a hierarchical objective evaluation (HOE) mechanism is incorporated to simplify the SEO process for PA location update. iii) For TDMA, the PS protocol allows the PA locations to be optimized separately using the SEO method, after which the time-power allocation is solved as a convex problem with a global optimum. Under the PM protocol, the PA locations are jointly optimized with the time-power resources through a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT)-based analytical solution. Numerical results demonstrate that: i) the pinching-antenna system (PASS) architecture significantly outperforms traditional fixed-antenna systems. ii) TDMA-PS achieves superior performance by fully leveraging the flexible PA reconfiguration and benefiting from interference-free transmission, whereas TIN serves as a practical lower-bound solution due to its simplicity despite its limited performance. iii) NOMA consistently outperforms TDMA-PM and, in high transmit power regimes with heterogeneous multicast group distributions, can even surpass the performance achieved by TDMA-PS.

Failure Detection for Pinching-Antenna Systems

A signal processing-based framework is proposed for detecting random segment failures in segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna systems. To decouple the passively combined uplink signal and to provide per-segment observability, tagged pilots are employed. A simple tag is attached to each segment and is used to apply a known low-rate modulation at the segment feed, which assigns a unique signature to each segment. Based on the tagged-pilot model, a low-complexity per-segment maximum-likelihood (ML) detector is developed for the case in which the pilot length is no smaller than the number of segments. For the case in which the pilot length is smaller than the number of segments, sparsity in the failure-indicator vector is exploited and a compressive sensing-based detector is adopted. Numerical results show that the per-segment detector approaches joint ML performance, while the compressive sensing-based detector achieves reliable detection with a short pilot and can outperform baselines that require much longer pilots.

Pinching Antennas-Aided Integrated Sensing and Multicast Communication Systems

A pinching antennas (PAs)-aided integrated sensing and multicast communication framework is proposed. In this framework, the communication performance is measured by the multicast rate considering max-min fairness. Moreover, the sensing performance is quantified by the Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound (BCRB), where a Gauss-Hermite quadrature-based approach is proposed to compute the Bayesian Fisher information matrix. Based on these metrics, PA placement is optimized under three criteria: communications-centric (C-C), sensing-centric (S-C), and Pareto-optimal designs. These designs are investigated in two scenarios: the single-PA case and the multi-PA case. 1) For the single-PA case, a closed-form solution is derived for the location of the C-C transmit PA, while the S-C design yields optimal transmit and receive PA placements that are symmetric about the target location. Leveraging this geometric insight, the Pareto-optimal design is solved by enforcing this PA placement symmetry, thereby reducing the joint transmit and receive PA placement to the transmit PA optimization. 2) For the general multi-PA case, the PA placements constitute a highly non-convex optimization problem. To solve this, an element-wise alternating optimization-based method is proposed to sequentially optimize all PA placements for the S-C design, and is further incorporated into an augmented Lagrangian (AL) framework and a rate-profile formulation to solve the C-C and Pareto-optimal design problems, respectively. Numerical results show that: i) PASS substantially outperforms fixed-antenna baselines in both multicast rate and sensing accuracy; ii) the multicasting gain becomes more pronounced as the user density increases; and iii) the sensing accuracy improves with the number of deployed PAs.

On the Maintainability of Pinching-Antenna Systems: A Failure-Repair Perspective

The pinching-antenna system (PASS) enables wireless channel reconfiguration through optimized placement of pinching antennas along dielectric waveguides. In this article, a unified analytical framework is proposed to characterize the maintainability of PASS. Within this framework, random waveguide failures and repairs are modeled by treating the waveguide lifetime and repair time as exponentially distributed random variables, which are characterized by the failure rate and the repair rate, respectively. The operational state of the waveguide is described by a two-state continuous-time Markov chain, for which the transition probabilities and steady-state probabilities of the waveguide being working or failed are analyzed. By incorporating the randomness of the waveguide operational state into the transmission rate, system maintainability is characterized using the probability of non-zero rate (PNR) and outage probability (OP). The proposed framework is applied to both a conventional PASS employing a single long waveguide and a segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna system (SWAN) composed of multiple short waveguide segments under two operational protocols: segment switching (SS) and segment aggregation (SA). Closed-form expressions for the PNR and OP are derived for both architectures, and the corresponding scaling laws are analyzed with respect to the service-region size and the number of segments. It is proven that both SS-based and SA-based SWAN achieve higher PNR and lower OP than conventional PASS, which confirms the maintainability advantage of segmentation. Numerical results demonstrate that: i) the maintainability gain of SWAN over conventional PASS increases with the number of segments, and ii) SA provides stronger maintainability than SS.

A Survey of Pinching-Antenna Systems (PASS)

The pinching-antenna system (PASS), recently proposed as a flexible-antenna technology, has been regarded as a promising solution for several challenges in next-generation wireless networks. It provides large-scale antenna reconfiguration, establishes stable line-of-sight links, mitigates signal blockage, and exploits near-field advantages through its distinctive architecture. This article aims to present a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in PASS. The fundamental principles of PASS are first discussed, including its hardware architecture, circuit and physical models, and signal models. Several emerging PASS designs, such as segmented PASS (S-PASS), center-fed PASS (C-PASS), and multi-mode PASS (M-PASS), are subsequently introduced, and their design features are discussed. In addition, the properties and promising applications of PASS for wireless sensing are reviewed. On this basis, recent progress in the performance analysis of PASS for both communications and sensing is surveyed, and the performance gains achieved by PASS are highlighted. Existing research contributions in optimization and machine learning are also summarized, with the practical challenges of beamforming and resource allocation being identified in relation to the unique transmission structure and propagation characteristics of PASS. Finally, several variants of PASS are presented, and key implementation challenges that remain open for future study are discussed.