Curved Waveguide-Enabled Pinching-Antenna System (C-PAS): Communication Performance Analysis

Abstract

Existing studies on the pinching-antenna system (PAS) assume that waveguides are deployed straight, which fails to serve communication regions with curved boundaries. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a curved waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna system (C-PAS), where the waveguide is placed along the building ceiling in an arc to maximize the line-of-sight (LoS) coverage. On this basis, the optimal pinching-antenna (PA) placement strategy and the nearest PA placement strategy are presented. The optimal strategy distinguishes between scenarios, i.e., with or without inner-wall blockage, and derives a closed-form solution for the optimal PA position to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) received at the user. Meanwhile, the nearest strategy aligns the PA with the angular position of a user in polar coordinates, thereby accommodating the curved geometry of the region. Furthermore, the outage probability (OP) and the average rate (AR) are analyzed for each strategy, and the corresponding analytical expressions are derived, respectively. The results show that the optimal PA placement strategy achieves better OP and AR performance than the nearest strategy, particularly under large waveguide loss coefficient or waveguide height. Moreover, for a service region of fixed area, there exists an optimal sector angle or inner-wall radius that either minimizes the outage probability or maximizes the average rate. Furthermore, the choice of a waveguide bending radius is influenced by the transmit power of the base station, where a smaller bending radius is preferable at high power and the middle arc performs best at low power.