Tripling the Capacity of Wireless Communications Using Electromagnetic Polarization

Maxwell's equations and electromagnetic waves have been well understood now for more than a century, yet we find a surprisingly new scheme for their exploitation in wireless communications. Although it is widely held that there are only two polarization states available for use in radio communication systems, we show that this number can be as high as six - three electric and three magnetic polarizations - in environments with scattering such as indoor or urban areas. In contrast to conventional wisdom, electromagnetic polarization in multi-path environments is neither constrained to be perpendicular to the line-of-sight, nor can the magnetic field at a point be calculated from co-localized electric field measurements. Thus, the independence of all six vector components enables the tripling of wireless communication capacities over what had been thought to be the limit before with two polarization states.