IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine deals with all technical and policy issues related to personalization, location-independent communications in all media. Papers highlight such topics as portable telephones, communicating palmtop computers, protocols, messaging, communications, and personalized traffic filtering. It also covers such policy issues as spectrum allocation, industry structure, and technology evolution.

Special Issue on Wireless Communications Over Near-Field Channels
截稿日期: 2023-08-01

The sixth generation (6G) of wireless technology aims to use higher frequencies in the low-THz bands to achieve faster data transmission and improved energy-efficiency. However, this comes with the challenge of severe path loss, which can be compensated for by equipping wireless base stations with extremely large aperture arrays (ELAAs). This pushes the electromagnetic diffraction field from the far-field region to the near-field region, where the signal wavefront at the receiver is no longer a plane-wave. Instead, it is a spherical wavefront, which requires the wireless communication system to be designed differently. In near-field scenarios, the system performance depends on the propagation direction and the distance between the transmitter and the receiver. The near-field ELAA system design enables the generation of focusing signals at a specific location, providing high-resolution with range-dependent very narrow beamwidth. Thus, the near-field operation brings numerous benefits to both communications and localization, such as boosting the signal strength and providing a new degree of freedom in both the angle and distance domains. Consequently, the wireless communications community has experienced a substantial shift towards utilizing near-field signal processing capabilities, which offer increased degrees of freedom and high-resolution with range-dependent narrow beamwidth, to achieve spatial multiplexing. Therefore, this Special Issue (SI) aims to bring together researchers from both academia and industry to introduce a compendium of recent advances in wireless communications over near-field channels for 6G. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

- Analog/digital beamforming for near-field communications.
- Resource allocation and channel estimation strategies for near-field communications.
- Near-field localization, sensing, and integrated sensing/communications.
- Wireless power transfer in near-field.
- Reconfigurable intelligent/holographic surfaces for near-field communications/sensing.
- Beam-squint/beam-split compensation in the near-field for millimeter-wave/THz systems.
- Spherical signal modeling/measurements for reactive/radiative near-field communications.
- Machine learning system design and processing for near-field communications
- Near-field internet-of-things applications.
- AI/ML-based design and processing of intelligent/tensorial surfaces-aided communications.
- Near-field orbital angular momentum for wireless communications.
- Modulation techniques and processing for near-field communications.
- Adaptive orientational beamforming techniques.
- Thermodynamics of near-field communications.
- Electromagnetic signal and information theory for near-field communications.
- Experiment and standardization efforts for near-field communications.
- Real-world prototypes and testbeds for near-field communications systems.