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On the Maintainability of Pinching-Antenna Systems: A Failure-Repair Perspective

Chongjun Ouyang, Hao Jiang, Zhaolin Wang, Yuanwei Liu, Zhiguo Ding

TL;DR

This paper addresses the maintainability of pinching-antenna systems (PASS) by modeling waveguide lifetime and repair times as exponential processes within a two-state CTMC, yielding steady-state availability and transition dynamics. It introduces a unified framework that integrates waveguide availability into the uplink rate, and derives closed-form expressions for the probability of non-zero rate (PNR) and outage probability (OP) for both conventional PASS and segmented SWAN (with segment switching and segment aggregation). The results reveal that segmenting the waveguide substantially improves maintainability, with SA outperforming SS and both surpassing the monolithic PASS, particularly as the service-region size grows. Numerical analyses confirm the theoretical insights, showing faster convergence to high reliability under SA and highlighting the practical benefits of SWAN as a maintainability-focused deployment option for PASS in 6G-like systems.

Abstract

The pinching-antenna system (PASS) enables wireless channel reconfiguration through optimized placement of pinching antennas along dielectric waveguides. In this article, a unified analytical framework is proposed to characterize the maintainability of PASS. Within this framework, random waveguide failures and repairs are modeled by treating the waveguide lifetime and repair time as exponentially distributed random variables, which are characterized by the failure rate and the repair rate, respectively. The operational state of the waveguide is described by a two-state continuous-time Markov chain, for which the transition probabilities and steady-state probabilities of the waveguide being working or failed are analyzed. By incorporating the randomness of the waveguide operational state into the transmission rate, system maintainability is characterized using the probability of non-zero rate (PNR) and outage probability (OP). The proposed framework is applied to both a conventional PASS employing a single long waveguide and a segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna system (SWAN) composed of multiple short waveguide segments under two operational protocols: segment switching (SS) and segment aggregation (SA). Closed-form expressions for the PNR and OP are derived for both architectures, and the corresponding scaling laws are analyzed with respect to the service-region size and the number of segments. It is proven that both SS-based and SA-based SWAN achieve higher PNR and lower OP than conventional PASS, which confirms the maintainability advantage of segmentation. Numerical results demonstrate that: i) the maintainability gain of SWAN over conventional PASS increases with the number of segments, and ii) SA provides stronger maintainability than SS.

On the Maintainability of Pinching-Antenna Systems: A Failure-Repair Perspective

TL;DR

This paper addresses the maintainability of pinching-antenna systems (PASS) by modeling waveguide lifetime and repair times as exponential processes within a two-state CTMC, yielding steady-state availability and transition dynamics. It introduces a unified framework that integrates waveguide availability into the uplink rate, and derives closed-form expressions for the probability of non-zero rate (PNR) and outage probability (OP) for both conventional PASS and segmented SWAN (with segment switching and segment aggregation). The results reveal that segmenting the waveguide substantially improves maintainability, with SA outperforming SS and both surpassing the monolithic PASS, particularly as the service-region size grows. Numerical analyses confirm the theoretical insights, showing faster convergence to high reliability under SA and highlighting the practical benefits of SWAN as a maintainability-focused deployment option for PASS in 6G-like systems.

Abstract

The pinching-antenna system (PASS) enables wireless channel reconfiguration through optimized placement of pinching antennas along dielectric waveguides. In this article, a unified analytical framework is proposed to characterize the maintainability of PASS. Within this framework, random waveguide failures and repairs are modeled by treating the waveguide lifetime and repair time as exponentially distributed random variables, which are characterized by the failure rate and the repair rate, respectively. The operational state of the waveguide is described by a two-state continuous-time Markov chain, for which the transition probabilities and steady-state probabilities of the waveguide being working or failed are analyzed. By incorporating the randomness of the waveguide operational state into the transmission rate, system maintainability is characterized using the probability of non-zero rate (PNR) and outage probability (OP). The proposed framework is applied to both a conventional PASS employing a single long waveguide and a segmented waveguide-enabled pinching-antenna system (SWAN) composed of multiple short waveguide segments under two operational protocols: segment switching (SS) and segment aggregation (SA). Closed-form expressions for the PNR and OP are derived for both architectures, and the corresponding scaling laws are analyzed with respect to the service-region size and the number of segments. It is proven that both SS-based and SA-based SWAN achieve higher PNR and lower OP than conventional PASS, which confirms the maintainability advantage of segmentation. Numerical results demonstrate that: i) the maintainability gain of SWAN over conventional PASS increases with the number of segments, and ii) SA provides stronger maintainability than SS.
Paper Structure (34 sections, 2 theorems, 70 equations, 9 figures)

This paper contains 34 sections, 2 theorems, 70 equations, 9 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Pinching Antennas
  3. From Monolithic Waveguides to Segmented Waveguides
  4. Motivation and Contributions
  5. System Model
  6. Conventional PASS
  7. System Architecture
  8. Channel Model
  9. Signal Model
  10. SWAN
  11. System Architecture
  12. Signal Model
  13. Maintainability of Conventional PASS
  14. Reliability Model of the Waveguide
  15. Failure Model
  16. ...and 19 more sections

Key Result

Lemma 1

For failure rate $\lambda_{\rm{M}}$ and repair rate $\mu_{\rm{M}}$, the CTMC transition probabilities for the monolithic waveguide can be expressed as follows:

Figures (9)

  • Figure 1: Illustration of conventional PASS.
  • Figure 2: Illustration of SWAN.
  • Figure 3: Illustration of two protocols for operating SWANs.
  • Figure 4: Illustration of the CTMC, where "W" and "F" refer to "working" and "failed", respectively.
  • Figure 5: PNR comparison of SS-based SWAN, SA-based SWAN, and conventional PASS.
  • ...and 4 more figures

Theorems & Definitions (11)

  • Lemma 1
  • Remark 1
  • Remark 2
  • Remark 3
  • Remark 4
  • Remark 5
  • Remark 6
  • Remark 7
  • Theorem 1
  • Remark 8
  • ...and 1 more