Learning-Based Codebook-Free Near-field Beamforming for Extremely Large-Scale MIMO

Extremely Large-scale Array (ELAA) is considered a frontier technology for future communication systems, pivotal in improving wireless systems’ rate and spectral efficiency. However, as ELAA employs a multitude of antennas operating at higher frequencies, users are typically situated in the near-field region. This inevitably leads to a significant increase in the overhead of beam training, requiring two-dimensional beam searching in both the angle and the distance domain. To address this problem, we propose a learning-based codebook-free near-field beamforming method. We strategically select padding and kernel size of convolutional neural network to efficiently extract complex channel state information features. We optimize the beamformers to maximize achievable rates in a multi-user network without predefined beam codebooks. Our solution requires only pre-estimated channel state information for optimal beamforming vector derivation during deployment. Simulation results demonstrate stable beamforming gain compared to baseline schemes, and the deep learning approach substantially reduces near-field beam training overhead.