Feedback-Efficient Beam-User Association for Near-Field mmWave Hybrid Beamforming Systems

Abstract

Near-field multiuser hybrid beamforming (HBF) requires joint angle-distance codebooks whose size, and hence reporting overhead, grows with the array aperture. For the extremely large array considered here, reporting one quality metric per codeword already incurs more overhead than full channel state information (CSI) feedback. This letter develops a feedback-efficient beam--user equipment (UE) association framework. The focusing codebook is sampled at beam-depth spacing within an effective beamfocusing Rayleigh distance (EBRD)-aware focusing region, with one far-field codeword per angular direction beyond that region, so that its radial law and size follow from the array geometry. Each UE probes this codebook but reports only its M strongest candidates, and the base station associates UEs and beams with a proportional-fair metric that consumes the leakage terms carried by this report together with the codeword correlations it knows, thereby allowing co-angular UEs to be multiplexed by focal distance. Simulations show that M=3 suffices: the proposed scheme stays within 0.6% of an optimistic full-metric reporting reference while using 0.8% of its feedback, a 99.11% reduction with respect to full-CSI feedback, and the interference-aware metric contributes up to 18.7% of the sum spectral efficiency over its interference-blind counterpart.