Optimal Uplink Pinching-Antenna Activation

Abstract

An uplink multiuser pinching-antenna system (PASS) is considered, where multiple dielectric waveguides are deployed at the base station and one pinching antenna (PA) is activated on each waveguide. For practical implementation, each PA is restricted to a finite number of preconfigured locations. The resulting uplink sum-rate maximization problem is represented as a layered tree search. Three algorithms are then developed: a greedy search (GS), a beam search (BeS), and an optimal branch-and-bound (BnB) search. In GS, the locally best branch is selected through efficient matrix-inverse updates. In BeS, several promising partial paths are retained to provide a tunable performance-complexity tradeoff. In BnB, noncompetitive subtrees are pruned through a monotonic transformed objective without loss of optimality. Substantial gains over a conventional fixed array are demonstrated by numerical results. Near-optimal performance is also achieved by GS and moderate-width BeS at a lower computational co t than BnB.