Mutual Coupling in Holographic MIMO: Physical Modeling and Information-Theoretic Analysis

TL;DR

This paper develops a physically grounded framework for holographic MIMO systems that models mutual coupling and correlation, analyzing their impact on information capacity and showing how antenna pattern design can optimize performance.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive physical and information-theoretic model for holographic MIMO, incorporating mutual coupling and correlation effects for the first time.

Findings

Mutual coupling can be exploited to enhance or mitigate correlation effects.

Antenna pattern design can optimize system performance across SNR levels.

The framework enables analysis of capacity limits considering physical coupling effects.

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for holographic multiantenna communication, a paradigm that integrates both wide apertures and closely spaced antennas relative to the wavelength. The presented framework is physically grounded, enabling information-theoretic analyses that inherently incorporate correlation and mutual coupling among the antennas. This establishes the combined effects of correlation and coupling on the information-theoretic performance limits across SNR levels. Additionally, it reveals that, by suitably selecting the individual antenna patterns, mutual coupling can be harnessed to either reinforce or counter spatial correlations as appropriate for specific SNRs, thereby improving the performance.