Is Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) Based Radio Communication an Unexploited Area?

Abstract

We compare the technique of using the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of radio waves for generating multiple channels in a radio communication scenario with traditional multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) communication methods. We demonstrate that, for certain array configurations in free space, traditional MIMO theory leads to eigen-modes identical to the OAM states. From this we conclude that communicating over the sub-channels given by OAM states is a subset of the solutions offered by MIMO, and therefore does not offer any additional gains in capacity.