Reconfigurable Transmission Design for PASS-MIMO via Waveguide Indexing

To address the stringent requirements of 6G industrial Internet of Things (IoT) and ultra-dense networks on spectral efficiency, hardware cost, and transmission reliability, this paper investigates waveguide index modulation based on the pinching-antenna system (PASS), a promising flexible multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) architecture featuring large-scale reconfigurability and robust line-of-sight (LoS) link establishment. A two-stage sparse transmission framework is proposed, where a Simulated Annealing-based Constrained Discrete Optimization (SA-CDO) algorithm is first employed to optimize pinching-antenna (PA) positions and construct a near-orthogonal equivalent channel dictionary for inter-waveguide interference suppression. Subsequently, an Orthogonal Least Squares-based Constellation-Constrained (OLS-CC) detector is developed to jointly recover active waveguide indices and modulation symbols with low computational complexity. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme consistently outperforms conventional antenna index modulation under both LoS and Rician fading channels across the entire SNR range. The SA-CDO optimization significantly reduces the bit error rate (BER), while the OLS-CC detector further improves sparse recovery accuracy and reduces the detection complexity from exponential to polynomial order. These results provide valuable insights for the design of highly reliable 6G IoT communication systems.