Electromagnetic Modeling of Deformation-Based Pinching Antennas

Abstract

Pinching-antenna systems (PAS) rely on local perturbations of a guiding structure to radiate part of the guided electromagnetic energy, making the physical response of the resulting pinching antenna (PA) fundamental to both guided-wave propagation and free-space radiation. To capture this coupled behavior, we develop an electromagnetic model of a finite deformation-based PA that directly relates the applied waveguide perturbation to its complex reflection and transmission responses and three-dimensional radiation characteristics. Full-wave MEEP simulations validate the model and demonstrate how the pinching ratio and pinched-section length jointly affect the transmitted power and phase, radiation power-fraction, and radiation pattern, thereby establishing PA geometry as a degree of freedom for controlling the radiation response. Importantly, this geometric dependence extends to communication performance, as the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) results reveal that neither minimizing the PA--user distance nor maximizing the radiation power-fraction necessarily yields the highest SNR, since the applied perturbation also determines the realized gain toward the user.