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The development of orbital angular momentum (OAM)-based radio vortex transmission presents a promising opportunity for increasing the capacity of wireless communication in correlated channels due to its inherent orthogonality among different OAM modes. One of the most popular schemes for high-efficient OAM transmission is the digital baseband associated with uniform circular array (UCA) based transceiver. However, the periodicity of complex-exponential feed makes the maximum number of orthogonal signals carried by multiple OAM modes generally restricted to the array-element number of UCA antenna, which poses an open question of how to employ more OAM modes given a fixed number of array elements. Furthermore, signals modulated with high-order OAM modes are difficult to be captured by the receiver due to their serious divergence as propagating in free space, thus severely limiting the capacity of radio vortex communications. To overcome the above challenges, in this paper based on the partly element-overlapped fractal geometry layout and effectively using low-order OAM modes, we propose the quasi-fractal UCA (QF-UCA) antenna based OAM multiplexing transmission. We perform the two-dimension OAM modulation (TOM) and demodulation (TOD) schemes with the orthogonal OAM mode number exceeding the array-element number, which is beyond the traditional concept of multiple antennas based wireless communications. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme can achieve more number of orthogonal multiplexing streams than the maximum number of orthogonal multiplexing corresponding to traditional multiple antenna systems.
Cheng et al. (Sat,) studied this question.