Antenna Activation and Resource Allocation in Multi-Waveguide Pinching-Antenna Systems

Pinching antennas, as a novel flexible-antenna technology capable of establishing line of sight (LoS) connections and effectively mitigating large-scale path loss, have recently attracted considerable research interests. However, the implementation of ideal pinching-antenna systems involves determining and adjusting pinching antennas to an arbitrary position on waveguides, which presents challenges to both practical deployment and related optimization. This paper investigates a practical pinching-antennas system in multi-waveguide scenarios, where pinching antennas are installed at pre-configured discrete positions to serve downlink users with non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). To improve system throughput, a sophisticated optimization problem is formulated by jointly considering waveguide assignment, antenna activation, successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding order design, and power allocation. By treating waveguide assignment and antenna activation as two coalition-formation games, a novel game-theoretic algorithm is developed, in which the optimal decoding order is derived and incorporated. For power allocation, monotonic optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA) are employed to construct global optimal and low-complexity solutions, respectively. Simulation results demonstrate that the NOMA-based pinching-antenna system exhibits superior performance compared to the considered benchmark systems, and the proposed solutions provide significant improvement in terms of sum rate and outage probability.