Practical real-time design of PASS-enabled ISAC systems

Establish a practical PASS-enabled integrated sensing and communication design that jointly tunes pinching-element locations and digital beamforming at the system update rate within a channel coherence time, despite the non-convexity of the underlying optimization problem.

Background

Pinching-antenna systems provide geometric flexibility for integrated sensing and communication by allowing the locations of pinching elements and the digital beamformer to adapt to users and sensing targets. However, exploiting these gains in practice requires jointly updating the antenna geometry and digital precoder at the system update rate, namely once per channel coherence time. The resulting joint optimization is high-dimensional and non-convex, creating an unresolved practical design challenge that motivates the low-complexity clustering-based approach developed in the paper.

References

Despite its potential, a practical PASS-enabled ISAC design remains open: the geometric degrees of freedom offered by PASS deliver substantial gains only if the joint tuning of pinching locations and digital beamforming is performed at the system update rate, i.e., once within a coherence time.

— Fast Tuning of Pinching Antenna-Assisted ISAC Systems via User Clustering  (2610.06492 - Niu et al., 5 Oct 2026) in Section 1, Introduction