Pinching-Antenna Systems (PASS)-Based User-Side Navigation: An Anchor-Line-based Approach

Pinching-antenna systems (PASS) are capable of dynamically reconfiguring wireless channels by flexibly repositioning pinching antennas (PAs) along the waveguides to establish short-range line-of-sight links. In this paper, a user-side navigation framework for PASS is proposed, where mobile users determine their own positions using only downlink broadcast signals without any prior knowledge of the PA positions. First, a Lambert W function-based PA positioning and pseudorange estimation (LWF-PAP) algorithm is developed, in which the closed-form expressions for both the PA positions along the waveguide and the PA-user pseudoranges are derived. Second, a weighted least squares-based PASS navigation (WLS-PAN) algorithm is formulated, where the nonlinear PASS-based navigation equations are transformed into a closed-form linear system, and the optimal weight matrix is derived, achieving minimum-variance unbiased estimation. Third, the PA-derived position dilution of precision (PA-PDOP) metric is further defined to characterize the theoretical accuracy bound. Simulation results demonstrate that centimeter-level positioning accuracy is achieved for both PAs and users within the breakpoint distance. It is also shown that uniform PA deployment and a moderate increase in the number of PAs effectively improve navigation accuracy, thereby validating the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework for distributed real-time user-side self-navigation.