Resource Allocation for Pinching-Antenna Systems (PASS)-enabled NOMA Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a PASS-based NOMA framework utilizing waveguide-division for dynamic reconfiguration, optimizing power, beamforming, and user scheduling to significantly improve sum-rate performance over traditional systems.

Contribution

It proposes a novel PASS-enabled NOMA framework with a joint optimization algorithm for power, beamforming, and user scheduling, demonstrating superior performance.

Findings

Achieves significant sum-rate gain over conventional systems.

Develops a low-complexity user scheduling algorithm.

Validates effectiveness through simulation results.

Abstract

Pinching-antenna systems (PASS) have emerged as a promising technology due to their ability to dynamically reconfigure wireless propagation environments. A novel PASS-based multi-user non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) framework is proposed by exploiting the waveguide-division (WD) transmission characteristic. Specifically, each NOMA user cluster is served by one dedicated waveguide, and the corresponding pinching beamforming is exploited to enhance the intra-cluster performance while mitigating the inter-cluster interference. Based on this framework, a sum-rate maximization problem is formulated for jointly optimizing power allocation, pinching beamforming, and user scheduling. To solve this problem, a two-step algorithm is developed, which decomposes the original problem into two subproblems. For the joint power allocation and pinching beamforming design, a penalty dual decomposition (PDD) algorithm is proposed to obtain the locally optimal solutions. Specifically, the coupling constraints are alleviated through augmented Lagrangian relaxation, and the resulting augmented Lagrangian (AL) problem is decomposed into four subproblems, which are solved by the block coordinate descent (BCD) method. For the user scheduling, a low-complexity matching algorithm is developed to solve the user-to-waveguide assignment problem. Simulation results demonstrate that 1) the proposed PASS-based NOMA framework under the WD transmission structure achieves significant sum-rate gain over conventional fixed-position antenna systems and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) scheme; and 2) the proposed matching-based user scheduling algorithm achieves near-optimal user-waveguide association with low computational complexity.