Outage-Constrained Environment Division Multiple Access (EDMA) for Pinching-Antenna Systems

Weihao Mao, Yang Lu, Yanqing Xu, Zhiguo Ding

Environment division multiple access (EDMA) has emerged as a promising multiple access paradigm, which mitigates inter-user interference by dynamically adjusting pinching antenna (PA) positions to the underlying propagation environment. This paper investigates a multi-user PA-enabled EDMA framework that accounts for probabilistic line-of-sight (LoS) blockages, random non-LoS (NLoS) scattering, and practical inwaveguide attenuation. With the aim of maximizing the total information rate, we formulate a joint PA deployment and power allocation problem subject to statistical rate outage constraints, the transmit power budget, and the feasible deployment region of PAs. We first consider a canonical two-user two-PA scenario and derive closed-form expressions for the outage probabilities, followed by a low-complexity projected gradient descent (PGD)-based algorithm to address the reformulated problem. Then, we extend our design to the general multi-user multi-PA scenario and derive tractable approximations for the outage probabilities by assuming interfering links to be NLoS and applying the Chernoff bounding technique, where a successive convex approximation (SCA)-based algorithm is proposed to handle the resulting nonconvex problem. Simulations validate the superiority of the proposed PA-enabled EDMA design and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. Specifically, both the PGD-based algorithm and the SCA-based algorithm achieve near-optimal performance in comparison with the exhaustive search. Furthermore, the PA-enabled EDMA design yields significant performance gains over both PA-enabled and conventional time division multiple access designs.