Integrated Sensing and Communication for Segmented Waveguide-Enabled Pinching Antenna Systems

Abstract: In this paper, an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) design for segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna array (SWAN) systems is proposed to improve the performance of systems by leveraging the low in-waveguide propagation loss of segmented waveguides. The hybrid segment selection and multiplexing (HSSM) protocol is implemented to provide favorable performance with less hardware cost. To achieve this, a joint transmit beamforming optimization, segment selection, and pinching antenna positioning problem is formulated to maximize the sum communication rate with the constraints of sensing performance. To solve the maximization problem, we propose a segment hysteresis based reinforcement learning (SHRL) algorithm to learn segment selection and pinching antenna positions in different progress to explore better strategies. Simulation results demonstrate that 1) the proposed SWAN-ISAC scheme outperforms the other baseline schemes, and 2) the proposed HARL algorithm achieves better performance compared to conventional RL algorithms.