Near-Field Variable-Width Beam Coverage and Codebook Design for XL-RIS

Abstract: To mitigate the issue of limited base station coverage caused by severe high-frequency electromagnetic wave attenuation, Extremely Large Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (XL-RIS) has garnered significant attention due to its high beam gain. However, XL-RIS exhibits a narrower beam width compared to traditional RIS, which increases the complexity of beam alignment and broadcast. To address this problem, we propose a variable-width beam generation algorithm under the near-field assumption and apply it to the near-field codebook design for XL-RIS. Our algorithm can achieve beam coverage for arbitrarily shaped codeword regions and generate a joint codebook for the multi-XL-RIS system. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme enables user equipment (UE) to achieve higher spectral efficiency and lower communication outage probability within the codeword region compared to existing works. Furthermore, our scheme exhibits better robustness to codeword region location and area variations.