Beamspace Modulation for Near Field Capacity Improvement in XL-MIMO Communications

Abstract: The spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) greatly increase in the near-field region of millimeter wave or terahertz multiple-input multiple-output communications with extremely large antenna arrays (XL-MIMO). To employ the increased spatial DoFs, a beamspace modulation (BM) strategy is introduced to the near field of XL-MIMO. BM can work with a fixed small number of RF chains. It exploits the increased spatial DoFs as modulation resources for capacity improvements. The achievable spectral efficiency and its asymptotic capacity are analyzed. Both theoretical and simulation results show that the proposed BM strategy considerably outperforms the existing benchmark that only selects the best beamspace for data transmission in terms of spectral efficiency.