题目：A Generic Geometric Framework for Near-Field Boundary Characterization of Arbitrary Antenna Array Pairs
报告人：Dr. Lin Cai，Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
时间：2026年8月10日上午10:30-11:30
地点：Room 1319, Building A1, CNV, 9 Mozhou East Road, Jiangning, Nanjing
组织单位：开云kaiyun官方网站
摘要：Near-field communication is becoming increasingly important in sixth generation (6G) wireless systems due to the adoption of extremely large antenna arrays, higher carrier frequencies, and distributed multi-panel deployments. Existing near-field boundary criteria, such as the Rayleigh distance, are derived under simplified array geometries with restricted spatial degrees of freedom, limiting their applicability to arbitrary deployments. This talk presents a generic geometric framework for near-field boundary characterization of arbitrarily deployed uniform planar array (UPA) pairs. By modeling arbitrary relative positions and orientations between the transmitter and receiver UPAs, a necessary and sufficient condition for far-field approximation is derived. A projection-based reformulation is then introduced to provide geometric insight while significantly simplifying the boundary characterization. Furthermore, the distance function is proven to be convex, and Bauer's Maximum Principle is applied to show that the maximum is attained at the aperture corners, thereby significantly reducing the search space to only the corner elements. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework accurately characterizes geometry-dependent near-field boundaries.
报告人简历：Lin Cai received the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2005 and 2010, respectively, and is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her research interests include sustainable wireless communications and networking, intelligent radio resource management, wireless Internet of Things (IoT), and near-field wireless communications. She has received several honors, including the Best Paper Award at IEEE GLOBECOM (2011), the NSF CAREER Award (2016), the IIT Sigma Xi Research Award (Junior Faculty Division, 2019), and the N2Women Stars in Networking and Communications Award (2021). She serves on the Executive Editorial Committee of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and has served as Co-Chair for several IEEE conferences. She was elevated to Fellow of IEEE in 2026 for her contributions to sustainable wireless communications.
