Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Pinching-antenna (PA) systems route millimeter wave signals through a leaky waveguide and radiate them at “pinch” apertures, offering low-cost line-of-sight (LoS) coverage. However, when multiple PAs serve multiple users simultaneously, the downlink channel becomes strongly frequency-selective, creating inter-symbol interference (ISI) that existing single-carrier designs overlook. This paper models the overall channel as a finite impulse response (FIR) filter, characterizes its frequency selectivity, and explicitly accounts for the resulting ISI. To overcome ISI, we introduce an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based framework and formulate a max-min resource-allocation problem to achieve user fairness. A lightweight two-stage heuristic-greedy subcarrier assignment, followed by per-user water-filling, achieves near-optimal fairness with polynomial complexity. Simulation results for an indoor layout demonstrate that the proposed scheme notably increases the minimum user rate compared to time-division single-carrier baselines and remains robust under moderate LoS blockage.
Source: IEEE Communications Letters
Authors: Thrassos K. Oikonomou, Sotiris A. Tegos, Panagiotis D. Diamantoulakis, Yuanwei Liu, George K. Karagiannidis
Institutions: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Subfield: Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7083313105