Work

Near-Field Communications with Block-Dominant Compressed Sensing: Fundamentals, Approaches, and Future Directions

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: In the context of extremely large-scale antenna arrays deployed in sixth-generation (6G) mobile networks, near-field (NF) communications have gained considerable attention. Unlike the planar waves formulated in the far-field, electromagnetic radiation propagates as spherical waves in the NF. This alteration affects the NF channel characteristics, particularly resulting in weak sparsity in angular-domain NF channels, which poses tricky challenges to the application of compressed sensing (CS). Motivated by these facts, we propose the block-dominant compressed sensing (BD-CS) techniques to assist NF communications. This article begins with an introduction on why block sparsity exists in the distance-limited NF region. Then, block-dominant side-information (BD-SI) is exploited to facilitate the actual NF communication implementation. While BD-CS shows promise in providing exceptional channel estimation accuracy and high spectral efficiency, several key challenges, opportunities, and practical implementation issues in NF communications need careful consideration.

Source: IEEE Communications Magazine

DOI: 10.1109/mcom.002.2400399

Authors: Liyang Lu, Ke Ma, Yue Wang, Zhaocheng Wang

Institutions: Tsinghua University, Georgia State University

Language: English

Topic: Sparse and Compressive Sensing Techniques

Subfield: Computational Mechanics

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Science Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation

Awards: G2656094716, G4812497824, G5579027751, CIF: Small: Signal Processing and Learning for NOMA Millimeter-Wave Massive MIMO Systems