Pearcey-Inspired Quartic Wavefront Shaping for Obstructed Near-Field Multi-User Communications

Radiative near-field (RNF) beamforming is vulnerable to blockages that disrupt Fresnel zones. This letter proposes an obstruction-unaware wavefront shaping strategy inspired by catastrophe optics. By superimposing a calibrated quartic phase, we generate a Pearcey-like wave packet that exhibits structural stability against perturbations. We establish a fair comparison protocol where the quartic beam is calibrated in free space to avoid exploiting obstruction knowledge. Numerical results demonstrate up to 8.5~dB SINR gain over conventional focusing for multi-user scenarios near the depth-of-focus limit. Crucially, this gain stems from improved channel conditioning under partial blockage, which mitigates the severe noise amplification inherent to zero-forcing precoding.

Airy Beamforming for Radiative Near-Field MU-XL-MIMO: Overcoming Half-Space Blockage

The move to next-generation wireless communications with extremely large-scale antenna arrays (ELAAs) brings the communications into the radiative near-field (RNF) region, where distance-aware focusing is feasible. However, high-frequency RNF links are highly vulnerable to blockage in indoor environments dominated by half-space obstacles (walls, corners) that create knife-edge shadows. Conventional near-field focused beams offer high gain in line-of-sight (LoS) scenarios but suffer from severe energy truncation and effective-rank collapse in shadowed regions, often necessitating the deployment of auxiliary hardware such as Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) to restore connectivity. We propose a beamforming strategy that exploits the auto-bending property of Airy beams to mitigate half-space blockage without additional hardware. The Airy beam is designed to ``ride'' the diffraction edge, accelerating its main lobe into the shadow to restore connectivity. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a Green's function-based RNF multi-user channel model that analytically reveals singular-value collapse behind knife-edge obstacles; (ii) an Airy analog beamforming scheme that optimizes the bending trajectory to recover the effective channel rank; and (iii) an Airy null-steering method that aligns oscillatory nulls with bright-region users to suppress interference in mixed shadow/bright scenarios. Simulations show that the proposed edge-riding Airy strategy achieves a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) improvement of over 20 dB and restores full-rank connectivity in shadowed links compared to conventional RNF focusing, virtually eliminating outage in geometric shadows and increasing multi-user spectral efficiency by approximately 35\% under typical indoor ELAA configurations. These results demonstrate robust RNF multi-user access in half-space blockage scenarios without relying on RIS.