Beamfocusing Versus Airy Beams: Does Antenna Blockage Require Beam Bending?

Overview & Synopsis

Airy beams are often proposed in array beamforming to bend beams around obstacles. We prove that, for a single-antenna receiver, conventional beamfocusing maximizes the received power regardless of how many antennas are blocked and, in expectation, even with phase errors in the channel state information. This also holds for multi-antenna receivers under a phase-separability condition that is satisfied in rank-one channels. Numerical results confirm that unmodified beamfocusing is optimal for physically small receivers (i.e., those that fit within the beamwidth) when an obstacle is present. For physically larger receivers, the optimal precoding deviates from beamfocusing to better illuminate the receiver's unobstructed parts, but will not become Airy beams. While Airy beams can be configured to perform well, their ability to follow a bent trajectory in front of an obstacle does not maximize the received power behind it.