Diffusion-Driven Terahertz Air-Ground Communications under Dynamic Atmospheric Turbulence

TL;DR

This paper introduces an AI-based framework for THz air-ground communications that models turbulence effects using fluid dynamics and optimizes transmission parameters to improve link capacity in dynamic atmospheric conditions.

Contribution

It develops a fluid-dynamics-informed turbulence model and an adaptive optimization algorithm for THz AG communications, addressing turbulence effects explicitly for the first time.

Findings

Turbulence-induced attenuation ranges from 18 to 28 dB at 0.7 Mach.

The proposed framework improves capacity by up to 66.5%.

Achieves 98% of the theoretical capacity limit.

Abstract

The ever-increasing demand for ultra-high data rates in space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs) has rendered terahertz THz communications a promising technology owing to its exceptionally broad and continuous spectrum resources. Nevertheless, in air-ground (AG) scenarios, the high mobility of aircraft induces intense and rapidly fluctuating turbulence, leading to additional propagation loss that is often overlooked in existing studies. To bridge this gap, this paper presents an AI-empowered THz AG communication framework that explicitly models turbulence-induced attenuation through fluid dynamics and integrates it into an adaptive optimization paradigm for communication performance enhancement. Specifically, a fluid-dynamics-informed attenuation model is established to characterize aircraft-generated turbulence and quantify its impact on THz signal propagation. Building upon this model, a joint power-attitude optimization problem is formulated to adaptively allocate transmit power and adjust aircraft attitude for maximizing link capacity. The optimization problem is efficiently solved using a diffusion-based algorithm that learns the nonlinear relationship between flight configuration and turbulence-induced attenuation. Comprehensive numerical evaluations demonstrate that the turbulence-induced attenuation ranges from 18 to 28 dB under attacking angles between -10 degree and 10 degree at 0.7 Mach, verifying the pronounced impact of aircraft-induced turbulence on THz propagation. Furthermore, the proposed framework attains an average capacity of 11.241 bps/Hz, substantially outperforming existing strategies by 22.8% and 66.5%, and approaching approximately 98% of the theoretical capacity limit.