Enabling Wireless Communications in the Terahertz Band

Overview

In recent years, wireless data traffic has grown exponentially due to a change in the way today's society creates, shares and consumes information. This change has been accompanied by an increasing demand for higher speed wireless communication. Wireless Terabit-per-second (Tbps) links are expected to become a reality within the next ten years. Towards this aim, Terahertz Band (0.1-10 THz) communication is envisioned as one of the key wireless technologies of the next decade. The THz band will help to overcome the spectrum scarcity problems and capacity limitations of current wireless networks, by providing an unprecedentedly large bandwidth. In addition, THz-band communication will enable a plethora of long-awaited applications ranging from instantaneous massive data transfer among nearby devices in Terabit Wireless Personal and Local Area Networks, to ultra-high-definition content streaming over mobile devices in 5G and beyond small cells. Nevertheless, there are several research challenges from the very-high and frequency-selective path loss of the THz-band channel and the very limited distance, which require innovative solutions and the revision of well-established concepts in wireless communication.

The research objective of this project is to strengthen the theoretical foundations of ultrabroadband communications in the THz band and bring the Tbps links one-step closer to reality. Our targeted breakthrough is to increase the capacity of wireless systems to reach Tbps and overcome the spectrum scarcity and capacity limitations of current wireless networks. This project will make contributions along three major thrusts. First, the concept of ultra-massive (UM)-MIMO is introduced to overcome the distance limitation, based on the use of the very large antenna arrays with thousands of antenna elements. The dynamic operation modes that include beamforming, spatial multiplexing and a combination of both, as well as the multi-band UM-MIMO will be analyzed. Second, accurate models for the three-dimensional (3D) end-to-end channel, and the 3D UM-MIMO channel will be developed, which will provide physical insights and the guidelines for the THz band communication design. Third, by capturing the unique channel peculiarities, distance-adaptive resource allocation, and low-sampling-rate and multi-carrier synchronization schemes will be investigated for THz band communications.