Near-Field Localization Beyond Bandwidth Limits for Large-Aperture Pinching-Antenna Systems

Abstract

Conventional bandwidth-limited ranging resolves delay on the scale of \(c_0/(2B)\), yet a large distributed aperture can support substantially finer localization through near-field carrier-phase diversity. This letter characterizes the coherent main-lobe width of the localization likelihood for pinching-antenna systems and shows that it is governed by the spread of the direction cosines subtended by the aperture at the target. The resulting expression recovers classical far-field angular and Fresnel-range scalings and reduces to a wavelength-scale cell when the aperture subtends a large solid angle. Guided by this characterization, a hierarchical maximum-likelihood search is developed, combining noncoherent coarse localization, coherent lobe selection, and local refinement. Numerical results under scattering demonstrate submillimeter localization above a threshold signal-to-noise ratio without localization failures in the tested ensemble.