New Degrees of Freedom for Beamforming Manipulation in MIMO Transmission with OAM

Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) has been considered as a new dimension in wireless transmission. In Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) system, OAM can also be utilized as the new Degrees of Freedom (DoF) to manipulate the beamforming instead of the traditional Channel State Information (CSI) feedback, so that the computation complexity of the beamforming dramatically decreases, as well as the capacity of the transmission is maintained approaching the upper bound of the MIMO system. For example, this beamforming manipulation with OAM is extremely efficient in the Line of Sight (LoS) MIMO system. In this paper, the mathematical model of the DoF in beamforming manipulation in MIMO with OAM is established. The computation complexity is evaluated, and compared in LoS environment within MIMO, MIMO-OAM, and OAM. The quantitatively simulation confirms the fact that MIMO-OAM has the best trade-off between the capacity and the computation complexity, which gives a consolidated evidence that the MIMOOAM scheme can be adopted as an efficient beamforming scheme in LoS backhaul links between the base station and the self backhaul small cell station, or Near Field Communications (NFC) directly between mobile terminals. Due to these promising applications, MIMO-OAM may become one of the candidate technologies in Beyond 5G (B5G) mobile communications.