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.

翻译：电磁信息理论是一门新兴的交叉学科，它融合了经典麦克斯韦电磁学与香农信息理论。该理论旨在从电磁视角揭示无线系统中的信息传输机制。现有关于电磁信息理论的研究主要集中于分析电磁信道特性、自由度以及系统容量。然而，这些工作并未阐明如何将电磁信息理论的知识融入无线系统的设计与优化中。为填补这一空白，本文提出了一种基于电磁信息理论、具有简化参数化的统计信道模型。得益于电磁相关函数的简化闭式表达式，该模型可便捷地应用于各种信道建模与推断任务。具体而言，通过对麦克斯韦方程组的解在可调冯·米塞斯分布上求平均，我们得到了电磁信道的空时相关函数模型，并将其命名为电磁相关函数。进一步地，通过调整电磁相关函数的参数，我们提出了一种基于电磁信息理论的协方差估计器，以精确捕捉信道协方差。由于经典的最小均方误差估计器能够利用信道协方差矩阵中包含的先验信息，我们进而通过用电磁相关函数替代协方差矩阵，提出了EIT-MMSE信道估计器。仿真结果表明，所提出的EIT-Cov协方差估计器与EIT-MMSE信道估计器均优于基线算法，从而证明了电磁信息理论对无线通信系统的有益性。