Viterbi State Selection for Discrete Pinching Antenna Systems

Pinching antennas enable dynamic control of electromagnetic wave propagation through reconfigurable radiating structures, but selecting an optimal subset of antennas remains a combinatorial problem with exponential complexity. This letter considers antenna subset selection for a waveguide-fed pinching antenna array serving ground users under a time-division access scheme. The achievable rate depends on the coherent superposition of the effective complex channel gains and is therefore highly sensitive to the relative phase alignment of the activated antennas. To address the prohibitive complexity of exhaustive search, we propose a Viterbi state selection (VSS) algorithm that exploits the phase structure of the combined received signal. The trellis state is defined by a quantized representation of the phase of the accumulated complex gain, and a Viterbi-based survivor rule is used to prune dominated antenna subsets across stages. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the same antenna selection and rate as exhaustive search, while reducing the computational complexity from exponential to polynomial in the number of available antennas.