TTD configurations for near-field beamforming: parallel, serial, or hybrid?

True-time delayers (TTDs) are popular components for hybrid beamforming architectures to combat the spatial-wideband effect in wideband near-field communications. In this paper, a serial and a hybrid serial-parallel TTD configuration are investigated for hybrid beamforming architectures. Compared to the conventional parallel configuration, the serial configuration exhibits a cumulative time delay caused by multiple TTDs, which potentially alleviates the maximum delay requirements on the individual TTDs. However, independent control of individual TTDs becomes impossible in the serial configuration. Therefore, a hybrid TTD configuration is proposed as a compromise solution. Furthermore, a power equalization approach is proposed to address the cumulative insertion loss of the serial and hybrid TTD configurations. Moreover, the wideband near-field beamforming design for different configurations is studied to maximize the spectral efficiency in both single-user and multiple-user systems. 1) For single-user systems, a closed-form solution for the beamforming design is derived. The preferred user locations and the required maximum time delay of each TTD configuration are characterized. 2) For multi-user systems, a penalty-based iterative algorithm is developed to obtain a stationary point of the spectral efficiency maximization problem for the considered TTD configurations. In addition, a hybrid-forward-and-backward (HFB) implementation is proposed to enhance the performance of the serial configuration. Our numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed designs and unveil that i) compared to the conventional parallel configuration, both the serial and hybrid configurations can significantly reduce the maximum time delays required for the individual TTDs and ii) the hybrid configuration excels in single-user systems, while the HFB serial configuration is preferred in multi-user systems.