Capacity of Continuous-Space Electromagnetic Channels with Lossy Transceiver

Abstract: In this paper, the capacity of continuous-space electromagnetic channels, where transceivers are confined in given lossy regions, is analyzed. First of all, the regions confining the transceivers are assumed to be filled with dielectric, which is either lossy or lossless. Then, for capacity analysis, we use the exact power consumption that takes into account the electromagnetic interaction between the field and the source. In addition, the exact noise model followed from the fluctuation-dissipation theorem in thermodynamics is used at the receive side. The contribution of our work is summarized as follows. First, we characterize the channel capacity as a function of the size and the physical property of the regions confining the transceivers and analytically show how the radiation efficiency affects the capacity. We also show that the outgoing channel at the transmit side and the incoming channel at the receive side are information-theoretically equivalent, and thus, the capacities of both channels are the same. Additionally, the quality factor, which is inversely proportional to the bandwidth, is theoretically derived, and the relationship between the spatial degrees of freedom of the channel and the quality factor is analyzed. Besides, we consider how the power consumption is affected by the backscattered waves and compare the recent experimental demonstration with our work by solving the gain-optimization problem with the constraint on the quality factor.