Joint OAM Multiplexing and OFDM in Sparse Multipath Environments

The emerging orbital angular momentum (OAM) based wireless communication is expected to be a high spectrum-efficiency communication paradigm to solve the growing transmission data rate and limited bandwidth problem. Academic researchers mainly concentrate on the OAM-based line-of-sight (LoS) communications. However, there exist some surroundings around the transceiver in most practical wireless communication scenarios, thus forming multipath transmission. In this paper, a hybrid orthogonal division multiplexing (HODM) scheme by using OAM multiplexing and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) in conjunction is proposed to achieve high-capacity wireless communications in sparse multipath environments, where the scatterers are sparse. We first build the OAM-based wireless channel in a LoS path and several reflection paths combined sparse multipath environments. We concentrate on less than or equal to three-time reflection paths because of the severe energy attenuation. The phase difference among the channel amplitude gains of the LoS and reflection paths, which is caused by the reflection paths, makes it difficult to decompose the OAM signals. We propose the phase difference compensation to handle this problem and then calculate the corresponding capacity in radio vortex wireless communications. Numerical results illustrate that the capacity of wireless communications by using our proposed HODM scheme can be drastically increased in sparse multipath environments.