Why Is Cubic-Phase Airy Beamforming Sufficient for Blockage Recovery?

Abstract

Blockage is a critical challenge for near-field communications, where reliable transmission depends heavily on the line-of-sight (LoS) path and can suffer severe power degradation when that path is obstructed. Near-field Airy beams offer a promising solution for blockage mitigation by forming curved trajectories that guide energy around obstacles, and can be practically generated with phased arrays by imposing a cubic source phase. However, trajectory-based interpretations explain how Airy beams propagate, but not why cubic-phase Airy beamforming is sufficient for blockage recovery or how much received-power gain the cubic term itself contributes. To answer these questions, we identify the blockage-induced phase mismatch relative to conventional near-field focusing and quantify how successive phase orders compensate it. The resulting analysis reveals that the linear and quadratic degrees of freedom, originally used to compensate the free-space geometric phase, can be reoptimized under blockage to provide resteering and refocusing, respectively. The quadratic term can compensate the dominant quadratic component of the additional mismatch, while the Airy cubic provides the first independent correction to the remaining non-quadratic mismatch. Simulations show that linear and quadratic compensation recover most of the available gain. The Airy cubic adds only $0.1433$ dB on average, yet enables the cubic-phase family to attain $99.77\%$ of the phase-only upper bound. Residual-phase analysis further determines when the remaining higher-order components are negligible within a prescribed received-power tolerance. These results explain why cubic-phase Airy beamforming is sufficient: lower-order phase terms provide most of the recovery, while the cubic term closes nearly all of the remaining gap.