Integrated Sensing and Communication for Segmented Waveguide-Enabled Pinching Antenna Systems

TL;DR

This work tackles joint sensing and communication in a downlink ISAC system built on segmented waveguide-enabled pinching antennas (SWAN). It introduces the HSSM protocol to realize segment multiplexing with reduced hardware cost and proposes the SHRL algorithm to stabilize segment decisions while learning beamforming and antenna placement. The approach yields superior sum-rate performance under sensing constraints across varied scenarios, outperforming conventional RL baselines. The results demonstrate the practical potential of SWAN-ISAC for high-performance, power-conscious ISAC deployments in future wireless networks.

Abstract

In this paper, an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) design for segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna array (SWAN) systems is proposed to improve the performance of systems by leveraging the low in-waveguide propagation loss of segmented waveguides. The hybrid segment selection and multiplexing (HSSM) protocol is implemented to provide favorable performance with less hardware cost. To achieve this, a joint transmit beamforming optimization, segment selection, and pinching antenna positioning problem is formulated to maximize the sum communication rate with the constraints of sensing performance. To solve the maximization problem, we propose a segment hysteresis based reinforcement learning (SHRL) algorithm to learn segment selection and pinching antenna positions in different progress to explore better strategies. Simulation results demonstrate that 1) the proposed SWAN-ISAC scheme outperforms the other baseline schemes, and 2) the proposed HARL algorithm achieves better performance compared to conventional RL algorithms.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: Illustration of SWAN-ISAC, $M =3, N = 4, K_c = 2, K_s = 1$.
• Figure 2: ISAC performance comparison between SWAN and PASS under two different cases.
• Figure 3: Performance comparison of SWAN-ISAC under different algorithms.