Pinching-Antenna Systems: Waveguide-Power Loss and Free-Space Path Loss Trade-Off

This paper studies movable pinching-antenna (PA) assisted communications, where a single PA can be dynamically placed along a dielectric waveguide to serve multiple users via orthogonal or non-orthogonal multiple access (OMA/NOMA). In contrast to the ideal-lossless waveguide model commonly assumed, our work explicitly incorporates waveguide-power loss, thereby introducing a fundamental trade-off with free-space path loss that jointly determines system performance. By deriving the lower-bound-based suboptimal PA position for two- and three-user scenarios under both with and without waveguide-power loss, we establish a general positioning guideline applicable to multi-user scenarios. Furthermore, we perform a comparative analysis between the proposed single-PA scheme and a static multi-PA scheme. Analytical and simulation results derive the conditions determining which scheme is superior, revealing that the trade-off is fundamentally governed by the relative dominance between the waveguide-power loss and the free-space path loss. Simulation results validating our analytical derivations also confirm that the proposed PA positioning rule in NOMA-based PASS holds for both successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding orders, demonstrating its robustness regardless of whether the near user decodes the far user’s signal first or vice versa.