Electromagnetic-Compliant Channel Modeling and Performance Evaluation for Holographic MIMO

Abstract: Recently, the concept of holographic multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is emerging as one of the promising technologies beyond massive MIMO. Many challenges need to be addressed to bring this novel idea into practice, including electromagnetic (EM)-compliant channel modeling and accurate performance evaluation. In this paper, an EM-compliant channel model is proposed for the holographic MIMO systems, which is able to model both the characteristics of the propagation channel and the non-ideal factors caused by mutual coupling at the transceivers, including the antenna pattern distortion and the decrease of antenna efficiency. Based on the proposed channel model, a more realistic performance evaluation is conducted to show the performance of the holographic MIMO system in both the single-user and the multi-user scenarios. Key challenges and future research directions are further provided based on the theoretical analyses and numerical results.