Holographic MIMO Communications

Imagine a MIMO communication system that fully exploits the propagation characteristics offered by an electromagnetic channel and ultimately approaches the limits imposed by wireless communications. This is the concept of Holographic MIMO communications. Accurate and tractable channel modeling is critical to understanding its full potential. Classical stochastic models used by communications theorists are derived under the electromagnetic far-field assumption. However, such assumption breaks down when large (compared to the wavelength) antenna arrays are considered - as envisioned in future wireless communications. In this paper, we start from the first principles of wave propagation and provide a Fourier plane-wave series expansion of the channel response, which fully captures the essence of electromagnetic propagation in arbitrary scattering and is also valid in the (radiative) near-field. The expansion is based on the Fourier spectral representation and has an intuitive physical interpretation, as it statistically describes the angular coupling between source and receiver. When discretized, it leads to a low-rank semi-unitarily equivalent approximation of the spatial electromagnetic channel in the angular domain. The developed channel model is used to compute the ergodic capacity of a Holographic MIMO system with different degrees of channel state information.