Covariance-Aware MM-PGD for Mixed Near-/Far-Field Activity Detection

Grant-free activity detection with mixed near-field (NF) and far-field (FF) devices is an important problem that can be addressed via covariance-based detectors. The difficulty is that NF users induce device-specific structured spatial covariances, whereas FF users are well approximated by isotropic covariances. Under a unified Rician model, we first formulate activity detection as a relaxed maximum-likelihood problem in the full LM-dimensional vectorized observation space. We then develop a covariance-aware majorization-minimization projected gradient descent (MM-PGD) detector. It updates the full activity vector jointly and avoids the per-coordinate high-rank subproblems that arise in the NF regime. Numerical results over SNR, antenna-count, and NF-ratio sweeps show that MM-PGD achieves up to 20x lower miss-detection probability than the strongest coordinate-wise baseline. The advantage is most pronounced at high NF ratios, while in the all-FF case MM-PGD performs on par with the strongest coordinate-wise baseline.