Electromagnetic Information Theory-Based Statistical Channel Model for Improved Channel Estimation

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information theory Vol. 71; no. 3; pp. 1777 - 1793
• Main Authors: Zhu, Jieao, Wan, Zhongzhichao, Dai, Linglong, Jun Cui, Tie
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.03.2025
• Subjects: Accuracy; Channel estimation; Channel models; Computational modeling; Correlation; Covariance matrices; electromagnetic correlation function (EMCF); Electromagnetic information theory (EIT); Electromagnetics; Information theory; Mathematical models; minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimators; spatio-temporal correlation function (STCF); Wireless communication
• ISSN: 0018-9448; 1557-9654
• DOI: 10.1109/TIT.2025.3526689

Electromagnetic information theory (EIT) is an emerging interdisciplinary subject that integrates classical Maxwell electromagnetics and Shannon information theory. The goal of EIT is to uncover the information transmission mechanisms from an electromagnetic (EM) perspective in wireless systems. Existing works on EIT are mainly focused on the analysis of EM channel characteristics, degrees-of-freedom, and system capacity. However, these works do not clarify how to integrate EIT knowledge into the design and optimization of wireless systems. To fill in this gap, in this paper, we propose an EIT-based statistical channel model with simplified parameterization. Thanks to the simplified closed-form expression of the EMCF, it can be readily applied to various channel modeling and inference tasks. Specifically, by averaging the solutions of Maxwell's equations over a tunable von Mises distribution, we obtain a spatio-temporal correlation function (STCF) model of the EM channel, which we name as the EMCF. Furthermore, by tuning the parameters of the EMCF, we propose an EIT-based covariance estimator (EIT-Cov) to accurately capture the channel covariance. Since classical MMSE estimators can exploit prior information contained in the channel covariance matrix, we further propose the EIT-MMSE channel estimator by substituting EMCF for the covariance matrix. Simulation results show that both the proposed EIT-Cov covariance estimator and the EIT-MMSE channel estimator outperform their baseline algorithms, thus proving that EIT is beneficial to wireless communication systems.