Shadow Area and Degrees of Freedom for Free-Space Communication
The number of degrees of freedom (NDoF) in a communication channel fundamentally limits the number of independent spatial modes available for transmitting and receiving information. Although the NDoF can be computed numerically for specific configurations using singular value decomposition (SVD) of the channel operator, this approach provides limited physical insight. In this paper, we introduce a simple analytical estimate for the NDoF between arbitrarily shaped transmitter and receiver regions in free space.