Sum-Rate Maximization for Pinching-Antenna-Assisted Downlink NOMA-ISAC Transmission

WU Huailiang; WANG Hong; LI Heyi; WANG Peiyu

doi:10.11999/JEIT260760

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WU Huailiang, WANG Hong, LI Heyi, WANG Peiyu. Sum-Rate Maximization for Pinching-Antenna-Assisted Downlink NOMA-ISAC Transmission[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260760

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WU Huailiang, WANG Hong, LI Heyi, WANG Peiyu. Sum-Rate Maximization for Pinching-Antenna-Assisted Downlink NOMA-ISAC Transmission[J]. Journal of Electronics & Information Technology. doi: 10.11999/JEIT260760

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Sum-Rate Maximization for Pinching-Antenna-Assisted Downlink NOMA-ISAC Transmission

doi: 10.11999/JEIT260760 cstr: 32379.14.JEIT260760

School of Communications and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China

Funds: The National Natural Science Foundation of China(62171237), The Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province(BK20231285), The Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (26CXJH1837)

Received Date: 2026-06-08
Accepted Date: 2026-09-15
Rev Recd Date: 2026-09-13

Available Online: 2026-09-21

Abstract

Abstract

Objective Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) and Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) are regarded as promising techniques for future wireless networks. Pinching Antenna (PA) systems provide a new reconfigurable transmission architecture by generating controllable radiation points along a dielectric waveguide, offering a new approach for NOMA-ISAC system design. However, existing studies mainly focus on PA-assisted NOMA, PA-assisted ISAC, or fixed-position antenna activation in PA-assisted NOMA-ISAC systems, whereas the joint design of power allocation and continuous PA positions in PA-assisted downlink NOMA-ISAC systems remains insufficiently investigated. The coupling among NOMA interference, sensing-signal detection, successive interference cancellation, and PA position design has not been fully considered. Therefore, a PA-assisted downlink NOMA-ISAC system is investigated, where the system sum rate is maximized under communication Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements and sensing performance constraints. Methods For the PA-assisted downlink NOMA-ISAC system, a joint sum-rate maximization problem is formulated under communication QoS requirements and sensing performance constraints. The power allocation coefficients and PA positions are jointly optimized to maximize the system sum rate. Since the optimization variables are highly coupled and the PA minimum-spacing constraint results in a discontinuous feasible region, the formulated problem is non-convex. To solve this problem, an Alternating Optimization (AO) scheme is proposed. The original problem is decomposed into two subproblems: power allocation optimization and PA position optimization. The power allocation subproblem is solved using Successive Convex Approximation (SCA), whereas the PA position subproblem is solved using a partitioned-interval search method. Results and Discussions The proposed method converges within a few iterations, and its sum-rate performance is close to that of the exhaustive-search benchmark while clearly outperforming the bisection-based benchmark (Fig. 2). The system sum rate increases with the number of PAs and gradually approaches saturation (Fig. 3). This is because additional PAs provide more spatial degrees of freedom, whereas the power allocated to each PA decreases under a fixed total transmit power. Compared with the baseline schemes, the proposed scheme achieves a higher sum rate, demonstrating that the performance improvement results from the joint optimization of power allocation and PA positions rather than single-variable optimization. Under different power budgets, the proposed method maintains performance close to exhaustive search and achieves stable advantages over other algorithms (Fig. 4). These results demonstrate that the proposed method provides an effective performance-complexity tradeoff for PA-assisted downlink NOMA-ISAC transmission. The sensitivity analysis further verifies that the proposed method remains close to exhaustive search under different sensing-signal cancellation SINR thresholds (Fig. 5). Conclusions A PA-assisted downlink NOMA-ISAC system is investigated in this paper. By jointly optimizing the power allocation coefficients and PA positions, a system sum-rate maximization problem is formulated under communication QoS requirements and sensing performance constraints. To address the non-convexity and discontinuous feasible region caused by the strong coupling among optimization variables and the PA minimum-spacing constraint, an AO-based solution framework is proposed. In this framework, the power allocation subproblem is handled by SCA, whereas the PA position optimization subproblem is solved using a partitioned-interval search method. Simulation results show that the proposed method converges within a small number of iterations, achieves performance close to exhaustive search with lower computational complexity, and outperforms the baseline schemes. These results verify the effectiveness of the joint design of power allocation and PA positions. Future work will consider multi-user and multi-target scenarios, imperfect channel state information, and more accurate sensing echo models to improve the applicability of PA-assisted NOMA-ISAC systems in complex practical environments.
- Pinching Antenna (PA),
- Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC),
- Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA),
- Alternating Optimization (AO)

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References(18)

References

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