Near-Field Channel Modeling for Electromagnetic Information Theory

Electromagnetic information theory (EIT) is one of the important topics for 6G communication due to its potential to reveal the performance limit of wireless communication systems. For EIT, the research foundation is reasonable and accurate channel modeling. Existing channel modeling works for EIT in non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenario focus on far-field modeling, which can not accurately capture the characteristics of the channel in near-field. In this paper, we propose the near-field channel model for EIT based on electromagnetic scattering theory. We model the channel by using non-stationary Gaussian random fields and derive the analytical expression of the correlation function of the fields. Furthermore, we analyze the characteristics of the proposed channel model, e.g., the sparsity of the model in wavenumber domain. Based on the sparsity of the model, we design a channel estimation scheme for near-field scenario. Numerical analysis verifies the correctness of the proposed scheme and shows that it can outperform existing schemes like least square (LS) and orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP).