Joint Transmission for Cellular Networks with Pinching Antennas: System Design and Analysis

TL;DR

This paper explores innovative joint transmission strategies using pinching antennas in cellular networks, analyzing their performance benefits and practical deployment considerations to enhance user equipment performance.

Contribution

It introduces three novel BS-PAS joint transmission schemes with optimized beamforming, providing comprehensive analysis and closed-form SNR expressions for improved network performance.

Findings

Joint transmission with pinching antennas significantly improves SNR.

Cooperative schemes outperform standalone deployments.

Performance depends on key network parameters.

Abstract

As an emerging flexible antenna technology for wireless communications, pinching-antenna systems, offer distinct advantages in terms of cost efficiency and deployment flexibility. This paper investigates joint transmission strategies of the base station (BS) and pinching antennas (PAS), focusing specifically on how to cooperate efficiently between the BS and waveguide-mounted pinching antennas for enhancing the performance of the user equipment (UE). By jointly considering the performance, flexibility, and complexity, we propose three joint BS-PAS transmission schemes along with the best beamforming designs, namely standalone deployment (SD), semi-cooperative deployment (SCD) and full-cooperative deployment (FCD). More specifically, for each BS-PAS joint transmission scheme, we conduct a comprehensive performance analysis in terms of the power allocation strategy, beamforming design, and practical implementation considerations. We also derive closed-form expressions for the average received SNR across the proposed BS-PAS joint transmission schemes, which are verified through Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that deploying pinching antennas in cellular networks, particularly through cooperation between the BS and PAS, can achieve significant performance gains. We further identify and characterize the key network parameters that influence the performance, providing insights for deploying pinching antennas.