Near-Field Hybrid Beamforming for Extremely Large-Scale (XL)-MIMO Communications

As extremely large-scale (XL) arrays advance, near-field (NF) communications have gained significant attention. With this shift, traditional far-field techniques are being revised for compatibility with new XL NF communication paradigms. This work presents NF hybrid beamforming (NF-HBF) approaches for XL-MIMO, focusing on challenges like near-field effects and spatial non-stationarity. First, it redefines the sparse recovery-based NF-HBF problem, shifting from angular- to polar-domain codebooks, leading to direct greedy hybrid beamforming (DG-HBF). However, challenges such as high computational complexity, phase shifter (PS) resolution, and spatial non-stationarities persist. To overcome these, this study proposes stepwise-individual and stepwise-joint greedy HBF methods, namely SIG-HBF and SJG-HBF. These methods simplify the process by approximating spherical-wave beams with planar-wave beams, promising lower PS resolution needs, reduced complexity, and the ability to tackle spatially non-stationary channels. Moreover, by exploring conjugate symmetric sequency-ordered Hadamard transforms, NF-HBF can be efficiently achieved using 2-bit PSs with values in {1, −1, j, −j}, facilitated by the SJG-HBF and SJG-HBF methods. Numerical simulations on the proposed methods demonstrate that DG-HBF can approach NF fully-digital beamforming, while SIG-HBF and SJG-HBF highlight the feasibility of utilizing angular-domain codebooks with low PS cost and low memory storage for NF-HBF.