Performance Analysis of Pinching-Antenna Systems

The sixth generation of wireless networks envisions intelligent and adaptive environments capable of meeting the demands of emerging applications such as immersive extended reality, advanced healthcare, and the metaverse. However, this vision requires overcoming critical challenges, including the limitations of conventional wireless technologies in mitigating path loss and dynamically adapting to diverse user needs. Among the proposed reconfigurable technologies, pinching antenna systems (PASs) offer a novel way to turn path loss into a programmable parameter by using dielectric waveguides to minimize propagation losses at high frequencies. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive analytical framework that derives closed-form expressions for the outage probability and average rate of PASs while incorporating both free-space path loss and waveguide attenuation under realistic conditions. In addition, we characterize the optimal placement of pinching antennas to maximize performance under waveguide losses. Numerical results show the significant impact of waveguide losses on system performance, especially for longer waveguides, emphasizing the importance of accurate loss modeling. Despite these challenges, PASs consistently outperform conventional systems in terms of reliability and data rate, underscoring their potential to enable high-performance programmable wireless environments.