Orbital-Angular-Momentum Embedded Massive MIMO: Achieving Multiplicative Spectrum-Efficiency for mmWave Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces an OAM-embedded massive MIMO framework for mmWave communications that significantly enhances spectrum efficiency by leveraging the multiplicative gain of OAM modes and MIMO multiplexing.

Contribution

It proposes a novel OEM framework, designs a specialized antenna, and develops power allocation and detection schemes to maximize spectrum efficiency in mmWave systems.

Findings

OEM framework achieves higher spectrum efficiency than traditional methods.

The designed antenna effectively converges OAM signals.

Simulation results confirm the multiplicative spectrum-efficiency gain.

Abstract

By enabling very high bandwidth for radio communications, the millimeter-wave (mmWave), which can easily be integrated with massive-multiple-input-multiple-output (massive-MIMO) due to small antenna size, has been attracting growing attention as a candidate for the fifth-generation (5G) and 5G-beyond wireless communications networks. On the other hand, the communication over the orthogonal states/modes of orbital angular momentum (OAM) is a subset of the solutions offered by massive-MIMO communications. Traditional massive-MIMO based mmWave communications did not concern the potential spectrum-efficiency-gain (SE-gain) offered by orthogonal states of OAM. However, the highly expecting maximum SE-gain for OAM and massive-MIMO communications is the product of SE-gains offered by OAM and multiplexing-MIMO. In this paper, we propose the OAM-embedded-MIMO (OEM) communication framework to obtain the multiplicative SE-gain for joint OAM and massive-MIMO based mmWave wireless communications. We design the parabolic antenna for each uniform circular array antenna to converge OAM signals. Then, we develop the mode-decomposition and multiplexing-detection scheme to obtain the transmit signal on each OAM-mode of each transmit antenna. Also, we develop the OEM-water-filling power allocation policy to achieve the maximum multiplicative SE-gain for OEM communications. The extensive simulations obtained validate and evaluate our developed parabolic antenna based converging method, mode-decomposition and multiplexing-detection scheme, and OEM-water-filling policy, showing that our proposed OEM mmWave communications can significantly increase the spectrum-efficiency as compared with traditional massive-MIMO based mmWave communications.