Fast Tuning of Pinching Antenna-Assisted ISAC Systems via User Clustering

Abstract: Pinching-antenna systems (PASSs) offer a great degree of flexibility for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) by adapting the pinching locations for both communication channel reshaping and sensing-beam steering. Despite that, direct location optimization in PASSs is high-dimensional and non-convex, making their fast reconfiguration difficult in practice. This work proposes a low-complexity PASS-assisted ISAC design based on user clustering. Instead of direct optimization of pinching locations, the elements on each waveguide are distributed over multiple segments, where each segment serves a cluster of users or targets. This alternative configuration reduces the location tuning problem to a low-dimensional weight allocation task, which can be efficiently addressed via a gradient based method. We propose a low-complexity iterative algorithm, in which the digital precoder is updated via an equivalent weighted mean squared error minimization, and pinching locations are updated via weight allocation and projection. Our numerical experiments show that the proposed design can significantly enhance the communication-sensing trade-off of ISAC systems over the benchmark designs with modest computational cost. The results highlight the potential gain of deploying PASS-assisted transceiver in practical ISAC systems.