RSMA Technique for Multi-User Downlink Single-Waveguide Multi-Pinching Antenna Systems

Abstract

Pinching antennas have recently emerged as a promising technology for reconfigurable wireless systems due to their ability to dynamically radiate signals from flexible positions along a waveguide. This letter investigates a multi-user communication framework by integrating rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) into a single-input single-output (SISO) single-waveguide architecture equipped with multiple pinching antennas. Multiple antennas are activated along a shared waveguide to radiate a common guided signal toward distributed users, enabling strong near-field line-of-sight (LoS) links with low hardware complexity and a single radiofrequency (RF) chain. To manage multi-user interference, RSMA is employed within the proposed architecture. Simulation results show that the proposed framework improves system sum-rate, enhances user rate fairness, and achieves lower bit error rate (BER) while preserving the low-cost and scalable characteristics of pinching antenna systems (PASS).