Last Meter Indoor Terahertz Wireless Access: Performance Insights and Implementation Roadmap

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in indoor terahertz wireless communication, highlighting propagation challenges, proposing a roadmap for THz Ethernet extension, and demonstrating high data rates through simulations and measurements.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of THz propagation modeling and designs, and introduces a practical roadmap for implementing indoor THz wireless links.

Findings

High data rates achievable at 300 GHz and 1.25 THz in indoor environments.

Propagation and scattering effects significantly influence THz link performance.

The Ethernet infrastructure can be repurposed as a backbone for THz wireless access.

Abstract

The terahertz (THz) band, 0.1-10 THz, has sufficient resources not only to satisfy the 5G requirements of 10 Gbit/s peak data rate but to enable a number of tempting rate-greedy applications. However, the THz band brings novel challenges, never addressed at lower frequencies. Among others, the scattering of THz waves from any object, including walls and furniture, and ultra-wideband highly-directional links lead to fundamentally new propagation and interference structures. In this article, we review the recent progress in THz propagation modeling, antenna and testbed designs, and propose a step-by-step roadmap for wireless THz Ethernet extension for indoor environments. As a side effect, the described concept provides a second life to the currently underutilized Ethernet infrastructure by using it as a universally available backbone. By applying real THz band propagation, reflection, and scattering measurements as well as ray-tracing simulations of a typical office, we analyze two representative scenarios at 300 GHz and 1.25 THz frequencies illustrating that extremely high rates can be achieved with realistic system parameters at room scales.