OAM Multiplexing in Multipath Environment

Owing to the theoretically unlimited and orthogonal states of orbital angular momentum (OAM) beams, OAM technique has been widely applied in different areas. Considering the divergence, misalignment, and the interferences caused by multipath propagation, it is commonly believed that OAM-based multiplexing can only be applied in short-range line-of-sight (LoS) situation. Recently, it was experimental demonstrated that OAM multiplexing can deal with multipath effects by utilizing a proper spatial equalization. In this work, we analyzed OAM multiplexing in both rich isotropic multipath environment and arbitrary multipath environment. It is shown that in real-life multipath environment, OAM multiplexing offers comparable performance as conventional multiplexing, even performs better under certain conditions.