Space Shift Keying for Pinching-Antenna Systems

Pinching-antenna systems (PASs) are a promising type of flexible-antenna technology, owing to their ability to reconfigure wireless channels and create strong line-of-sight links by adjusting the positions of pinching antennas on waveguides. In this letter, a space shift keying (SSK) scheme is proposed for PASs to reap inherent advantages of both PASs and SSK. SSK-PAS solely utilizes the index of a selected waveguide to convey information per symbol interval. Under the discrete deployment of pinching antennas, we optimize the antenna activation pattern on each waveguide with the aim to minimize the bit error rate of SSK-PAS. In particular, by relaxing binary activation indicators to continuous variables, a successive convex approximation based algorithm is developed to solve the zero-one integer programming. Computer simulation results are shown to verify the developed algorithm and demonstrate the superior performance of SSK-PAS.