Fast Pinching-Antenna Activation for AirComp

Abstract

A pinching-antenna system (PASS) is considered for over-the-air computation (AirComp). Multiple dielectric waveguides are deployed at the base station, and one pinching antenna (PA) is activated on each waveguide. For practical implementation, each PA is restricted to a finite set of preconfigured locations. The resulting discrete activation problem is formulated to minimize the AirComp mean-squared error (MSE). After the optimal aggregation vector is derived, the minimum MSE is expressed through an inverse Gram matrix. A rank-one recursion is derived to evaluate the exact MSE reduction produced by each candidate. Greedy search and beam search are then developed for fast tree search. To further reduce complexity, coherent aggregation search is proposed from a first-order MSE approximation. It admits a separable closed-form selection rule and is asymptotically optimal in the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Numerical results show that the proposed methods substantially improve the AirComp accuracy of PASS over conventional antenna arrays.