SCAN-BEST: Sub-6GHz-Aided Near-field Beam Selection with Formal Reliability Guarantees

Abstract: As millimeter-wave (mmWave) MIMO systems adopt larger antenna arrays, near-field propagation becomes increasingly prominent, especially for users close to the transmitter. Traditional far-field beam training methods become inadequate, while near-field training faces the challenge of large codebooks due to the need to resolve both angular and distance domains. To reduce in-band training overhead, prior work has proposed to leverage the spatial-temporal congruence between sub-6 GHz (sub-6G) and mmWave channels to predict the best mmWave beam within a near-field codebook from sub-6G channel estimates. To cope with the uncertainty caused by sub-6G/mmWave differences, we introduce a novel Sub-6G Channel Aided Near-field BEam SelecTion (SCAN-BEST) framework that wraps around any beam predictor to produce candidate beam subset with formal suboptimality guarantees. The proposed SCAN-BEST builds on conformal risk control (CRC), and is calibrated offline using limited calibration data. Its performance guarantees apply even in the presence of statistical shifts between calibration and deployment. Numerical results validate the theoretical properties and efficiency of SCAN-BEST.