Pinching-Antenna Systems (PASS) Aided Over-the-air Computation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a PASS-aided over-the-air computation system that optimizes antenna placement and transmission parameters to significantly improve data aggregation accuracy in edge networks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel PASS-aided AirComp system with joint optimization of antenna placement, power, and decoding to reduce errors caused by channel misalignments.

Findings

Joint optimization outperforms benchmark schemes in accuracy.

Flexible antenna placement improves channel alignment.

Simulation confirms significant error reduction.

Abstract

Over-the-air computation (AirComp) enables fast data aggregation for edge intelligence applications. However the performance of AirComp can be severely degraded by channel misalignments. Pinching antenna systems (PASS) have recently emerged as a promising solution for physically reshaping favorable wireless channels to reduce misalignments and thus AirComp errors, via low-cost, fully passive, and highly reconfigurable antenna deployment. Motivated by these benefits, we propose a novel PASS-aided AirComp system that introduces new design degrees of freedom through flexible pinching antenna (PA) placement. To improve performance, we consider a mean squared error (MSE) minimization problem by jointly optimizing the PA position, transmit power, and decoding vector. To solve this highly non-convex problem, we propose an alternating optimization based framework with Gauss-Seidel based PA position updates. Simulation results show that our proposed joint PA position and communication design significantly outperforms various benchmark schemes in AirComp accuracy.