A General Analytical Framework for the Resolution of Near-Field Beamforming

The resolution is an important performance metric of near-field communication networks. In particular, the resolution of near field beamforming measures how effectively users can be distinguished in the distance-angle domain, which is one of the most significant features of near-field communications. In a comparison, conventional far-field beamforming can distinguish users in the angle domain only, which means that near-field communication yields the full utilization of user spatial resources to improve spectrum efficiency. In the literature of near-field communications, there have been a few studies on whether the resolution of near-field beamforming is perfect. However, each of the existing results suffers its own limitations, e.g., each is accurate for special cases only, and cannot precisely and comprehensively characterize the resolution. In this letter, a general analytical framework is developed to evaluate the resolution of near-field beamforming. Based on this derived expression, the impacts of parameters on the resolution are investigated, which can shed light on the design of the near-field communications, including the designs of beamforming and multiple access tequniques.