Extra DoF of Near-Field Holographic MIMOCommunications Leveraging Evanescent Waves

In this letter, we consider transceivers with spatially-constrained antenna apertures of rectangular symmetry, and aim to improve of spatial degrees of freedom (DoF) and channel capacity leveraging evanescent waves for information transmission in near-field scenarios based on the Fourier plane-wave series expansion. The treatment is limited to an isotropic scattering environment but can be extended to the non-isotropic case through the linear-system theoretic interpretation of plane-wave propagation. Numerical results show that evanescent waves have the significant potential to provide additional DoF and capacity in the near-field region.