Pearcey-Inspired Quartic Wavefront Shaping for Obstructed Near-Field Multi-User Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel wavefront shaping method inspired by catastrophe optics that creates stable Pearcey-like wave packets, significantly improving multi-user near-field communication performance under obstructions.

Contribution

It proposes a quartic phase-based wavefront shaping technique that enhances robustness against blockages without prior obstruction knowledge, outperforming conventional focusing methods.

Findings

Achieves up to 8.5 dB SINR gain in multi-user scenarios.

Demonstrates improved channel conditioning under partial blockage.

Provides a fair comparison protocol for obstruction-unaware beamforming.

Abstract

Radiative near-field (RNF) beamforming is vulnerable to blockages that disrupt Fresnel zones. This letter proposes an obstruction-unaware wavefront shaping strategy inspired by catastrophe optics. By superimposing a calibrated quartic phase, we generate a Pearcey-like wave packet that exhibits structural stability against perturbations. We establish a fair comparison protocol where the quartic beam is calibrated in free space to avoid exploiting obstruction knowledge. Numerical results demonstrate up to 8.5~dB SINR gain over conventional focusing for multi-user scenarios near the depth-of-focus limit. Crucially, this gain stems from improved channel conditioning under partial blockage, which mitigates the severe noise amplification inherent to zero-forcing precoding.