C-PASS: Center-Fed Pinching Antenna System

Abstract: A novel architecture of the center-fed pinching antenna system (C-PASS) is proposed. In contrast to the conventional end-fed PASS, signals are fed from the center input ports and propagate towards both sides of the waveguide. By doing so, spatial-multiplexing gain can be achieved in a single waveguide. Based on the proposed C-PASS, closed-form expressions for the degree of freedom (DoF) and power scaling laws are derived. These theoretical results reveal that C-PASS can achieve \emph{twice} the DoF and an additional multiplexing gain of $\mathcal{O}(P_T \ln^4 N/N^2)$ compared to the conventional PASS, where $P_T$ and $N$ represent the transmit power and pinching antenna number, respectively. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate that substantial capacity improvements can be achieved through the enhanced DoF and multiplexing gain of the C-PASS.