Multiple Access in Pinching-Antenna Systems: A Survey, Impairment Analysis, and Evaluation
Abstract
Pinching-antenna systems attach dielectric pinches to a waveguide, creating line-of-sight radiation points within a few meters of any user. The pinches on one waveguide, however, radiate the same signal, unlike a conventional array, where each element transmits a dedicated signal. Separating the signals of multiple users therefore becomes challenging and requires a new perspective on multiple access. Most existing studies rest on an idealized model, and no survey examines the access schemes under realistic impairments. This article surveys multiple access in pinching-antenna systems and organizes fifty-six works into a unified taxonomy by spatial degrees of freedom. The users of one waveguide can be separated only in time, frequency, power, or guided mode, while multiple waveguides add the space domain. The article then identifies the impairments critical to this separation, which perturb the effective channel, leak interference across orthogonal resources, or couple the pinches on the uplink, and summarizes them in an impairment-versus-method map. A unified evaluation of time-, frequency-, power-, and space-domain access under identical channel and impairment models reveals that the degradation is method specific. The analytical and numerical results give insight into multiple access in these systems and provide a basis for its impairment-aware design, a necessary step toward their adoption in practical networks.
Related
- Impact of Antenna Position Errors on TDMA and NOMA in Pinching-Antenna Systems
- S-PASS: Star-Topology Pinching-Antenna Systems with Pipelined Antenna Pre-Positioning
- Secrecy Sum-Rate Maximization for RSMA-Enabled Pinching-Antenna Systems
- Design and Analysis of Pinching-Antenna Systems With Radially Deployed Waveguides (X-PASS)
- AirPASS: Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Pinching Antenna Systems
BibTeX
@misc{jiang2026multiple,
title = {{Multiple Access in Pinching-Antenna Systems: A Survey, Impairment Analysis, and Evaluation}},
author = {Wei Jiang and Hans Dieter Schotten},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.03836},
eprint = {2610.03836},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03836},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Multiple Access in Pinching-Antenna Systems: A Survey, Impairment Analysis, and Evaluation
AU - Wei Jiang
AU - Hans Dieter Schotten
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.03836
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03836
AB - Pinching-antenna systems attach dielectric pinches to a waveguide, creating line-of-sight radiation points within a few meters of any user. The pinches on one waveguide, however, radiate the same signal, unlike a conventional array, where each element transmits a dedicated signal. Separating the signals of multiple users therefore becomes challenging and requires a new perspective on multiple access. Most existing studies rest on an idealized model, and no survey examines the access schemes under realistic impairments. This article surveys multiple access in pinching-antenna systems and organizes fifty-six works into a unified taxonomy by spatial degrees of freedom. The users of one waveguide can be separated only in time, frequency, power, or guided mode, while multiple waveguides add the space domain. The article then identifies the impairments critical to this separation, which perturb the effective channel, leak interference across orthogonal resources, or couple the pinches on the uplink, and summarizes them in an impairment-versus-method map. A unified evaluation of time-, frequency-, power-, and space-domain access under identical channel and impairment models reveals that the degradation is method specific. The analytical and numerical results give insight into multiple access in these systems and provide a basis for its impairment-aware design, a necessary step toward their adoption in practical networks.
ER -