Fast Hybrid Far/Near-Field Beam Training for Extremely Large-Scale Millimeter Wave/Terahertz Systems

In this paper, we consider the problem of downlink beam training for extremely large-scale millimeter wave (mmWave)/Terahertz (THz) systems, where the far-field assumption which treats wavefronts as planar waves may not hold valid. For such hybrid far/near-field channels, beam training needs to identify the best beam alignment on a two-dimensional angle-range domain. An exhaustive search scheme sequentially scanning the entire angle-range space incurs a high training overhead. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an efficient hybrid far/near-field beam training method. By utilizing the approximate orthogonality of near-field steering vectors of the same effective distance, we devise a multi-directional beam training sequence which can more efficiently scan the entire angle-range space. Based on the devised beam training sequence, we develop a simple estimation method at the receiver that can simultaneously identify the angle and the range associated with the dominant path. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves better performance than the exhaustive search scheme, while with a much lower overhead cost. The proposed method also presents a clear advantage over other existing state-of-the-art hybrid far/near-field beam training methods in terms of performance and generality.