On Dual-Fed Pinching Antenna Systems with In-Waveguide Attenuation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual-fed pinching antenna system (DF-PAS) that dynamically selects feed points to reduce in-waveguide attenuation, significantly improving data rates in wireless communication systems.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel dual-fed PAS architecture with dynamic feed-point selection, providing closed-form solutions and an optimization framework to enhance performance over traditional single-fed systems.

Findings

DF-PAS outperforms SF-PAS in various network setups.

The proposed method effectively mitigates in-waveguide attenuation.

Simulation confirms improved ergodic rate with DF-PAS.

Abstract

Pinching antenna systems (PAS) have recently emerged as a promising architecture for flexible and reconfigurable wireless communications. However, their performance is fundamentally constrained by in-waveguide attenuation, which is non-negligible in practical dielectric waveguides and can severely degrade the achievable data rate, particularly for long waveguides. To overcome this limitation, we propose a dual-fed PAS (DF-PAS), in which each waveguide is equipped with two feed points located at the two ends, enabling dynamic feed-point selection based on user locations. This design effectively shortens the in-waveguide propagation distance and mitigates attenuation-induced power loss without modifying the waveguide structure or the PA actuation mechanism. We investigate the DF-PAS in both single- and multi-waveguide scenarios. For the single-waveguide case, we derive closed-form high-SNR approximations of the ergodic rate and obtain closed-form solutions for the optimal PA position and feed-point selection under time-division multiple access (TDMA). We then extend DF-PAS to a multi-waveguide scenario, where we first derive closed-form high-SNR approximations of the ergodic rate and then formulate a joint optimization problem over feed-point selection, PA placement, and beamforming under general orthogonal multiple access (OMA). To solve this problem efficiently, we develop a two-phase optimization framework that integrates greedy feed-point switching, gradient-based PA placement, and WMMSE-based beamforming. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DF-PAS consistently outperforms conventional single-fed PAS (SF-PAS) across various network configurations, validating its effectiveness as a practical and scalable solution for mitigating in-waveguide attenuation in PAS-enabled wireless networks.