Vertical Pinching Antenna Systems (V-PAS) Aided UAV Communications

Abstract

To address the limitation that existing horizontal pinching antenna systems (PAS) are primarily designed for ground users and confined to two-dimensional (2D) coverage, this paper proposes deploying a pinching antenna (PA) along the facade of urban buildings to construct a vertical pinching antenna system (V-PAS) for ultra-low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications. The proposed architecture employs a dielectric waveguide continuously deployed along the full height of buildings, extending the coverage capability of PAS from the 2D plane to three-dimensional (3D) airspace, ensuring a stable line-of-sight (LoS) link. We define the concept of pinching multiplicative path loss (PMPL) to characterize the cascaded multiplicative attenuation of the waveguide and free-space path losses. It is found that PMPL is insensitive to vertical distance, rendering V-PAS highly adaptive to building heights. Furthermore, accurate and asymptotic closed-form expressions for outage probability and ergodic rate under lossy waveguide conditions are derived, respectively, and the symmetry and optimality of system performance with respect to the midpoint of the access point (AP) height are discovered and proved. The results show that V-PAS achieves performance advantages over the benchmark without PA in most ultra-low-altitude UAV communication scenarios. Only under extremely high transmission power and large UAV operational area may the outage probability of V-PAS with a lossy waveguide be inferior to that of the benchmark without PA, but the ergodic rate of V-PAS still maintains an advantage. By contrast, V-PAS with a lossless waveguide outperforms the benchmark without PA in UAV communications, representing the theoretical performance upper bound of V-PAS.