Pinching Antenna System-Assisted Hybrid AirComp-NOMA Uplink: Joint Precoding and Antenna Placement Optimization

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel PAS-assisted hybrid uplink system combining AirComp and NOMA, optimizing precoding and antenna placement to enhance data aggregation and communication performance.

Contribution

It introduces a joint optimization framework for precoding and antenna deployment in a PAS-assisted hybrid AirComp-NOMA system, improving overall rate performance.

Findings

The proposed design significantly outperforms benchmark schemes.

Joint optimization improves hybrid rate by balancing computation and communication.

Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the optimization framework.

Abstract

This paper studies a pinching antenna system (PAS)-assisted hybrid uplink architecture that integrates over-the-air computation (AirComp) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to simultaneously support distributed data aggregation and individual communication services. A base station with a dielectric waveguide hosting multiple pinching antennas receives signals from AirComp and NOMA users over shared time-frequency resources. To assess joint computation-communication performance, a hybrid metric combining the AirComp computation rate and the NOMA sum rate is proposed. Based on this metric, a joint optimization problem is formulated to maximize the hybrid rate by optimizing user transmit precoding, receive combining, and antenna deployment, subject to power, quality-of-service, and aggregation accuracy constraints. An alternating optimization framework is developed to solve the resulting non-convex problem. Numerical results show that the proposed design achieves significant performance gains over several benchmark schemes.