Center-Fed Pinching Antenna System (C-PASS): Modeling, Analysis, and Beamforming Design

Abstract: A generalized framework for the novel center-fed pinching antenna system (C-PASS) is proposed. Within this framework, closed-form expressions for the degree of freedom (DoF) and power scaling law of the proposed C-PASS are first derived. These theoretical results reveal that the achievable DoF scales linearly with the number of input ports, $M$, and the number of receive antennas, $K$. Furthermore, the derived power scaling laws demonstrate that the C-PASS achieves a power gain of order $\mathcal{O}(P_T M)$, where $P_T$ denotes the transmit power. Based on the proposed C-PASS modeling, a sum-rate maximization problem for the joint optimization of transmit and pinching beamforming is then formulated. To solve this highly coupled non-convex problem, an efficient alternating optimization algorithm is developed. More particularly, the transmit precoding and power splitting ratios are updated via derived closed-form solutions, while the pinching antenna positions and radiation coefficients are optimized using block coordinate descent (BCD) methods. Finally, our numerical results reveal that the single-waveguide C-PASS: 1) achieves superior DoF and power scaling laws compared to the single-waveguide PASS; and 2) outperforms the multi-waveguide PASS in high-attenuation regimes, yielding a substantial gain exceeding $10$ dB.