Environment-Aware Network-Level Design of Generalized Pinching-Antenna Systems--Part I: Traffic-Aware Case

2026-02-18

AI Summary

Existing generalized beamforming antenna systems are largely confined to link-level design, struggling to balance network coverage and location-based fairness while exhibiting high sensitivity to user mobility and substantial control overhead. This work proposes an environment-aware, network-level deployment framework that, for the first time, incorporates spatial traffic maps into system design, formulating a max-min fairness model optimized for traffic-weighted average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). By exploiting the problem’s separable structure, the non-convex optimization is efficiently solved through a combination of block coordinate descent, global candidate-point search, and bisection methods. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed traffic-aware deployment strategy significantly outperforms both fixed deployments and heuristic approaches across diverse scenarios.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking

Abstract

Existing studies on generalized pinching-antenna systems are predominantly link-level, which optimize system parameters for a given user set with objectives defined by per-user performance metrics. Such designs do not capture network-level requirements, e.g., region-wide coverage and location fairness, and may require frequent re-optimization as users move or enter/leave, incurring control overhead and sensitivity to localization errors. Motivated by this gap, this two-part paper aims to develop an environment-aware network-level design framework for generalized pinching-antenna systems. Part I focuses on the traffic-aware case, where user presence is modeled statistically by a spatial traffic map and performance is optimized and evaluated in a traffic-aware sense; Part II addresses the geometry-aware case in obstacle-rich environments. In Part~I, we introduce traffic-weighted average SNR metrics and formulate two traffic-aware deployment problems: (i) maximizing the traffic-weighted network average SNR, and (ii) a fairness-oriented traffic-restricted max--min average-SNR design over traffic-dominant grids. To solve these nonconvex problems with low complexity, we reveal and exploit their separable structures. For the network-average objective, we establish unimodality properties of the hotspot-induced components and develop a candidate-based global maximization method that only needs to evaluate the objective at a small set of candidate antenna positions. For the traffic-restricted max--min objective, we develop a block coordinate decent framework where each coordinate update reduces to a globally solvable one-dimensional subproblem via an epigraph reformulation and bisection. Simulations show that traffic-aware pinching-antenna positioning consistently outperforms representative fixed and heuristic traffic-aware deployments in the considered setups.

Problem

• generalized pinching-antenna systems
• network-level design
• traffic-aware deployment
• coverage and fairness
• spatial traffic map

Innovation

• traffic-aware design
• generalized pinching-antenna systems
• network-level optimization
• nonconvex optimization
• block coordinate descent