Near-Field Beam Tracking with Extremely Large Dynamic Metasurface Antennas

Abstract: The interplay between large antenna apertures and high frequencies in future generations of wireless networks will give rise to near-field communications. In this paper, we focus on the hybrid analog and digital beamforming architecture of dynamic metasurface antennas, which constitutes a recent prominent enabler of extremely massive antenna architectures, and devise a near-field beam tracking framework that initiates near-field beam sweeping only when the base station estimates that its provided beamforming gain drops below a threshold from its theoretically optimum value. Novel analytical expressions for the correlation function between any two beam focusing vectors, the beamforming gain with respect to user coordinate mismatch, the direction of the user movement yielding the fastest beamforming gain deterioration, and the minimum user displacement for a certain performance loss are presented. We also design a non-uniform coordinate grid for effectively sampling the user area of interest at each position estimation slot. Our extensive simulation results validate our theoretical analysis and showcase the superiority of the proposed near-field beam tracking over benchmarks.