Multicasting Pinching Antenna Systems With LoS Blockage

2026-02-07

AI Summary

This work addresses the position optimization of mobile dielectric particles—referred to as pinching antennas—in multicast communication under non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions. For the first time, the minorization-maximization (MM) framework is introduced into pinching antenna systems to develop a provably convergent optimization algorithm. Two computationally efficient strategies for solving the resulting convex surrogate problems are proposed: a candidate search method (CSM) and a bisection search method (BSM). Experimental results demonstrate that, in a scenario with eight pinching antennas and twenty-five users, BSM reduces runtime by approximately 2.5× compared to CSM. Moreover, the proposed system significantly outperforms conventional antenna configurations under NLoS conditions, thereby validating both the efficacy and superiority of the approach.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Non-convex Optimization
• Machine Learning: Optimization
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: On-Device user modeling, personalization, and recommendation
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social mining and social search on the Web

Abstract

Pinching-antenna systems (PASS) represent a promising customizable wireless access mechanism in high-frequency bands, enabled by dielectric waveguides and movable dielectric particles, called pinching antennas (PAs). In this work, we study optimal position allocation of PAs in PASS for multicasting in the downlink when a line-of-sight (LoS) link does not necessarily exist between all users and the PAs. The multicasting problem is solved by leveraging minorization-maximization (MM) principle to yield a provably convergent algorithm. In each run of the MM based procedure, we solve a convex surrogate problem using two methods called the candidate search method (CSM) and the bisection search method (BSM). With both BSM and CSM, we not only report superior performance of the multicasting PASS in non-LoS environments compared to conventional antenna systems (CAS), but also determine that BSM yields better overall computational complexity when the number of users and PAs increases. For example, we report that when we have 8 PAs and 25 users, the execution time with the CSM is approximately 2.5 times that with the BSM.

Problem

• multicasting
• pinching antenna systems
• LoS blockage
• position allocation
• high-frequency bands

Innovation

• Pinching-Antenna Systems
• Multicasting
• Line-of-Sight Blockage
• Minorization-Maximization
• Computational Complexity