Antenna Activation for NOMA Assisted Pinching-Antenna Systems

In this letter, a nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted downlink pinching-antenna system is investigated, where multiple pinching antennas can be activated at preconfigured positions along a dielectric waveguide to serve users via NOMA. In particular, the objective of this letter is to study at what locations and how many pinching antennas should be activated in order to maximize the system throughput. To this end, a sum rate maximization problem with antenna activation is formulated. With the help of matching theory, the formulated problem can be recast as a one-sided one-to-one matching, for which a low-complexity algorithm is developed. Simulation results indicate that the considered NOMA assisted pinching-antenna system can outperform conventional fixed-antenna systems in terms of sum rate, and the proposed matching-based antenna activation algorithm yields a significant performance gain over the considered benchmarks.