Exploiting Structured Sparsity in Near Field: From the Perspective of Decomposition

The structured sparsity can be leveraged in traditional far-field channels, greatly facilitating efficient sparse channel recovery by compressing the complexity of overheads to the level of the scatterer number. However, when experiencing a fundamental shift from planar-wave-based far-field modeling to spherical-wave-based near-field modeling, whether these benefits persist in the near-field regime remains an open issue. To answer this question, this article delves into structured sparsity in the near-field realm, examining its peculiarities and challenges. In particular, we present the key features of near-field structured sparsity in contrast to the far-field counterpart, drawing from both physical and mathematical perspectives. Upon unmasking the theoretical bottlenecks, we resort to bypassing them by decoupling the geometric parameters of the scatterers, termed the triple parametric decomposition (TPD) framework. It is demonstrated that our novel TPD framework can achieve robust recovery of near-field sparse channels by applying the potential structured sparsity and avoiding the curse of complexity and overhead.