Hybrid Near- and Far-Field Communications for RIS-UAV System: Novel Beamfocusing Design

With the further investigation and utilization of the extremely large-scale antenna array (ELAA) and Terahertz (THz) band, as well as the increasingly stringent standards of regulatory agencies, the near-field communications are evolving into the norm of intelligent transportation systems. In this work, we propose a novel beamfocusing scheme to improve the system performance for the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided hybrid near- and far-field communications with multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Compared to conventional schemes without considering the near-field beam pattern with a finite depth, in our proposed scheme, the RIS only serves one UAV, while other UAVs are within the radiation range of the concentrated signal energy by beamfocusing. Specifically, we study the polar radius and angular deviations between UAVs with a given beamfocusing gain, aiming to reveal the impact of RIS structure on beamfocusing gain. We also make a fair comparison between the proposed scheme and allocated RIS scheme, deriving the feasible reference distance. In addition, we study the feasibility for different RIS structures focusing on the beamfocusing gain, which has the potential to improve the system performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is always superior than that of the allocated RIS scheme within the feasible reference distance.