Optimization for Pinching Antennas System With Multiple Carriers and Rate Splitting Multiple Access

To meet the urgent demands for spectral efficiency and multi-user access in high-frequency application scenario for the sixth-generation wireless communication, this paper investigates a rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) system assisted by pinching antennas (PAs) with multiple waveguides and multiple carriers, aiming to maximize the overall system sum rate. To address the high sensitivity of high-frequency signals to PA movement in the overloaded scenarios, a two-stage PA position optimization method based on both path loss and phase shift error minimization is proposed under RSMA framework. Specifically, the first step is to perform coarse adjustment by minimizing large-scale path loss. Then, based on the derivation of a closed-form solution for the ideal phase shift in a single-user single-carrier case, the fine-grained positions of PAs are optimized via a one-dimensional line search to minimize the composite phase shift error across all users and carriers. In order to meet the quality of service requirements, the Lagrange dual method is employed to obtain the closed form of beamforming vectors after the PA positions are determined. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves significant improvement in sum rate and confirm that RSMA exhibits stronger robustness to inaccurate PA positions caused by both discrete position channel estimation and physical hardware compared to other multiple-access techniques in PA-assisted systems. Furthermore, the results validate that fine-grained PA position adjustment is particularly crucial in high-frequency bands.