Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for NOMA-Assisted Uplink Pinching-Antenna Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy-efficient resource allocation scheme for NOMA-assisted uplink pinching-antenna systems, jointly optimizing user transmit power and antenna placement to improve energy efficiency over traditional methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint optimization framework for power and antenna positioning in NOMA pinching-antenna systems, employing alternating optimization and particle swarm algorithms.

Findings

Significant EE improvements over conventional antennas.

Outperforms orthogonal multiple access-based pinching-antenna systems.

Effective joint optimization approach for power and antenna placement.

Abstract

The pinching-antenna architecture has emerged as a promising solution for reconfiguring wireless propagation environments and enhancing system performance. While prior research has primarily focused on sum-rate maximization or transmit power minimization of pinching-antenna systems, the critical aspect of energy efficiency (EE) has received limited attention. Given the increasing importance of EE in future wireless communication networks, this work investigates EE optimization in a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-assisted multi-user pinching-antenna uplink system. The problem entails the joint optimization of the users' transmit power and the pinching-antenna position. The resulting optimization problem is non-convex due to tightly coupled variables. To tackle this, we employ an alternating optimization framework to decompose the original problem into two subproblems: one focusing on power allocation and the other on antenna positioning. A low-complexity optimal solution is derived for the power allocation subproblem, while the pinching-antenna positioning subproblem is addressed using a particle swarm optimization algorithm to obtain a high-quality near-optimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms both conventional-antenna configurations and orthogonal multiple access-based pinching-antenna systems in terms of EE.