Airy Beamforming for Radiative Near-Field MU-XL-MIMO: Overcoming Half-Space Blockage

TL;DR

This paper introduces an Airy beamforming technique for radiative near-field MU-XL-MIMO systems that overcomes half-space blockage, restoring connectivity and improving spectral efficiency without additional hardware.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Airy beamforming strategy exploiting the auto-bending property to mitigate blockage effects in RNF MIMO systems, eliminating the need for RIS.

Findings

Achieves over 20 dB SNR improvement in shadowed links.

Restores full-rank connectivity behind obstacles.

Increases multi-user spectral efficiency by approximately 35%.

Abstract

The move to next-generation wireless communications with extremely large-scale antenna arrays (ELAAs) brings the communications into the radiative near-field (RNF) region, where distance-aware focusing is feasible. However, high-frequency RNF links are highly vulnerable to blockage in indoor environments dominated by half-space obstacles (walls, corners) that create knife-edge shadows. Conventional near-field focused beams offer high gain in line-of-sight (LoS) scenarios but suffer from severe energy truncation and effective-rank collapse in shadowed regions, often necessitating the deployment of auxiliary hardware such as Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) to restore connectivity. We propose a beamforming strategy that exploits the auto-bending property of Airy beams to mitigate half-space blockage without additional hardware. The Airy beam is designed to ``ride'' the diffraction edge, accelerating its main lobe into the shadow to restore connectivity. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a Green's function-based RNF multi-user channel model that analytically reveals singular-value collapse behind knife-edge obstacles; (ii) an Airy analog beamforming scheme that optimizes the bending trajectory to recover the effective channel rank; and (iii) an Airy null-steering method that aligns oscillatory nulls with bright-region users to suppress interference in mixed shadow/bright scenarios. Simulations show that the proposed edge-riding Airy strategy achieves a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) improvement of over 20 dB and restores full-rank connectivity in shadowed links compared to conventional RNF focusing, virtually eliminating outage in geometric shadows and increasing multi-user spectral efficiency by approximately 35\% under typical indoor ELAA configurations. These results demonstrate robust RNF multi-user access in half-space blockage scenarios without relying on RIS.