On the Impact of Pinching Antennas on Traffic Offloading

2026-06-02

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of low traffic offloading efficiency and high energy consumption in wireless networks by introducing pinching antennas into network architecture design for the first time. Leveraging their unique capability to dynamically reshape cell boundaries, the proposed approach enables flexible resource allocation. The authors develop a transmission and offloading model for pinching antennas and formulate two offloading strategies based on whether the original cell’s bandwidth is released. By jointly optimizing transmit power and antenna placement, the system minimizes total power consumption while significantly enhancing offloading efficiency and achieving balanced inter-cell resource utilization.

Abstract

Pinching antennas are characterized by their capability to create strong line-of-sight connections and realize multi-antenna systems in a flexible manner. Existing works have demonstrated the significant potential of pinching antennas for physical layer design. The aim of this paper is to investigate how pinching antennas can be used to reshape the architecture of future networks. In particular, this paper is motivated by the key advantage of pinching antennas, which is to reconfigure the physical boundaries of wireless cells, and focuses on the impact of pinching antennas on traffic offloading. The models for traffic offloading and pinching antenna transmission are presented first. Then, two traffic offloading strategies are developed based on whether an offloading user releases its bandwidth in its original cell. An overall transmit power minimization problem is formulated, where the optimal solutions for the transmit powers and antenna locations are obtained. The presented simulation results demonstrate that the use of pinching antennas can efficiently support traffic offloading, yield low energy consumption, and achieve balanced cell resource utilization.

Problem

• pinching antennas
• traffic offloading
• wireless networks
• cell reconfiguration
• resource utilization

Innovation

• pinching antennas
• traffic offloading
• cell boundary reconfiguration
• transmit power minimization
• multi-antenna systems