Near-field wideband beam training for ELAA with uniform circular array

Abstract

Extremely large-scale antenna array (ELAA) at millimeter wave (mmWave) and Terahertz (THz) band has been considered a key technology for combating high attenuation in high-frequency bands in future 6G communications. Uniform circular arrays (UCAs) have attracted much attention because of their ability to provide flat beamforming gain at all angles. To realize efficient beamforming, beam training is widely used to acquire channel state information. However, with a large antenna number, the beam training overhead in ELAA systems becomes overwhelming. Moreover, with a large bandwidth, the beam defocus effect severely degrades beam training accuracy. To address these issues, this paper proposes a frequency-dependent focusing (FDF)-based beam training scheme to realize effective beam training in near-field wideband ELAA systems with UCA. Specifically, we first analyze the FDF property of UCA, where signals at different subcarriers can simultaneously focus on different distances. Then, by exploiting the FDF property to search different distances using different subcarriers simultaneously, we design a hierarchical codebook and propose an FDF-based beam training scheme. To reveal the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, we compare its necessary beam training overhead with that of existing schemes. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve accurate beam training in near-field wideband UCA systems with a low beam training overhead.