Pinching-Antenna System Design Under Random LoS and NLoS Channels

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Authors: Y Xu, Yang Lu, Zhiguo Ding, Tsung-Hui Chang
Cited by: 3
References: 36

Abstract

Pinching antennas, realized through position-adjustable radiating elements along dielectric waveguides, have emerged as a promising flexible-antenna technology thanks to their ability to dynamically reshape large-scale channel conditions. However, most existing studies focus on idealized LoS-dominated environments, overlooking the stochastic nature of realistic wireless propagation. This paper investigates a more practical multiuser pinching-antenna system under a composite probabilistic channel model that captures distance-dependent LoS blockage and NLoS scattering. To account for both efficiency and reliability aspects of communication, two complementary design metrics are considered: an average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) metric characterizing long-term link quality and fairness, and an outage-constrained metric ensuring a prescribed reliability level. Based on these metrics, we formulate two optimization problems: the first seeks to maximize the minimum average SNR across users, while the second seeks to maximize a guaranteed SNR threshold subject to per-user outage constraints. Although both problems are inherently nonconvex, we exploit their underlying monotonic structures and develop low-complexity, bisection-based algorithms that achieve globally optimal solutions using only simple scalar evaluations. Extensive simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods and demonstrate that pinching-antenna systems significantly outperform conventional fixed-antenna designs even under random LoS and NLoS channels.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Energy Harvesting in Wireless Networks Advanced Wireless Communication Technologies Cooperative Communication and Network Coding

Publication details

Journal / source
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Volume
25
Pages
18440–18455
Publication date
1 January 2026
Language
EN