Near-Field Beam Training Through Beam Diverging

This paper investigates beam training techniques for near-field (NF) extremely large-scale antenna arrays (ELAAs). Existing NF beam training methods predominantly rely on beam focusing, where the base station (BS) transmits highly spatially selective beams to locate the user equipment (UE). However, these beam-focusing-based schemes suffer from both high beam sweeping overhead and limited accuracy in the NF, primarily due to the narrow beams' high susceptibility to misalignment. To address this, we propose a novel NF beam training paradigm using diverging beams. Specifically, we introduce the beam diverging effect and exploit it for low-overhead, high-accuracy beam training. First, we design a diverging codeword to induce the beam diverging effect with a single radio frequency (RF) chain. Next, we develop a diverging polar-domain codebook (DPC) along with a hierarchical method that enables angular-domain localization of the UE with only 2 log_2(N) pilots, where N denotes the number of antennas. Finally, we enhance beam training performance through two additional techniques: a DPC angular range reduction strategy to improve the effectiveness of beam diverging, and a pilot set expansion method to increase overall beam training accuracy. Numerical results show that our algorithm achieves near-optimal accuracy with a small pilot overhead, outperforming existing methods.