Bifocal-Lens Converging Based OAM Wireless Communications

Abstract

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) based radio vortex wireless communications have received much attention recently because it can significantly increase the spectrum efficiency. The uniform circular array (UCA) is a simple antenna structure for high spectrum efficiency radio vortex wireless communications. However, the OAM based electromagnetic waves are vortically hollow and divergent, which may result in the signal loss. Moreover, the divergence of corresponding OAM based electromagnetic wave increases as the order of OAM-mode increases. Therefore, it is difficult to use high-order OAM-mode, because the corresponding received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is very small. To overcome the difficulty of high-order OAM modes transmission, in this paper we propose a lens antenna based electromagnetic waves converging scheme, which maintains the angular identification of multiple OAM-modes for radio vortex wireless communications. We further develop a bifocal lens antenna to not only converge the electromagnetic wave, but also compensate the SNR loss on traditional electromagnetic waves. Simulation results show that the proposed bifocal lens can converge the OAM waves into cylinder-like beams, providing an efficient way to increase the spectrum efficiency of wireless communications.