dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaOvercoming the Shadow: Bending Airy Beams for Radiative Near-Field Multi-User Access in Half-Space Blockage Scenarios
| Authors | Yifeng Qin, Jing Chen, Zhi Hao Jiang, Zhi Ning Chen, Yongming Huang |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | 2601.09098vv3 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09098 |
| License | http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/ |
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, making hardware remedies such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) impractical. 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 an 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.
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"date_created": "2026-02-17T05:53:19.843000Z",
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"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, making hardware remedies such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) impractical. 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\u0027\u0027 the diffraction edge, accelerating its main lobe into the shadow to restore connectivity. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a Green\u0027s 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 an 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.",
"arxiv_id": "2601.09098",
"authors": [
"Yifeng Qin",
"Jing Chen",
"Zhi Hao Jiang",
"Zhi Ning Chen",
"Yongming Huang"
],
"categories": [
"cs.IT",
"eess.SP",
"math.IT",
"physics.optics"
],
"license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
"title": "Overcoming the Shadow: Bending Airy Beams for Radiative Near-Field Multi-User Access in Half-Space Blockage Scenarios",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09098",
"version": "v3"
},
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