Wireless Communications and Applications Above 100 GHz: Opportunities and Challenges for 6G and Beyond

By Theodore Ted S. Rappaport, Yunchou Xing, Ojas Kanhere, Shihao Ju, A. Madanayake, Soumyajit Mandal, Ahmed Alkhateeb, G. Trichopoulos. IEEE Access, 2019

2,133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Frequencies from 100 GHz to 3 THz are promising bands for the next generation of wireless communication systems because of the wide swaths of unused and unexplored spectrum. These frequencies also offer the potential for revolutionary applications that will be made possible by new thinking, and advances in devices, circuits, software, signal processing, and systems. This paper describes many of the technical challenges and opportunities for wireless communication and sensing applications above 100 GHz, and presents a number of promising discoveries, novel approaches, and recent results that will aid in the development and implementation of the sixth generation (6G) of wireless networks, and beyond. This paper shows recent regulatory and standard body rulings that are anticipating wireless products and services above 100 GHz and illustrates the viability of wireless cognition, hyper-accurate position location, sensing, and imaging. This paper also presents approaches and results that show how long distance mobile communications will be supported to above 800 GHz since the antenna gains are able to overcome air-induced attenuation, and present methods that reduce the computational complexity and simplify the signal processing used in adaptive antenna arrays, by exploiting the Special Theory of Relativity to create a cone of silence in over-sampled antenna arrays that improve performance for digital phased array antennas. Also, new results that give insights into power efficient beam steering algorithms, and new propagation and partition loss models above 100 GHz are given, and promising imaging, array processing, and position location results are presented. The implementation of spatial consistency at THz frequencies, an important component of channel modeling that considers minute changes and correlations over space, is also discussed. This paper offers the first in-depth look at the vast applications of THz wireless products and applications and provides approaches for how to reduce power and increase performance across several problem domains, giving early evidence that THz techniques are compelling and available for future wireless communications.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72cb9b7db52ef30f9fab2f5f8df9f224598c81b7

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Citations in the corpus

6G Wireless Channel Measurements and Models: Trends and Challenges (2020, background): “In [4], some preliminary path loss, partition loss, and scattering measurements were conducted at 140 GHz.”
Terahertz Band: The Last Piece of RF Spectrum Puzzle for Communication Systems (2019, background): “[33] approaches, THz research is recently being pushed into the center stage.”
Terahertz Band Communication: An Old Problem Revisited and Research Directions for the Next Decade (2021, background): “…ﬁve main aspects, namely, hardware for THz communications [1], [2], [4], [5], [21], [23]–[25], [28], [29], [33], THz channels [1], [2], [4], [5], [20], [21], [23], [26], [29]–[31], THz communication techniques [1], [2], [4], [5], [27], [30]–[32], THz networking [1], [2], [31], [32], and THz…”
6G Wireless Communication Systems: Applications, Requirements, Technologies, Challenges, and Research Directions (2019, background): “[58] Some technical challenges and opportunities for wireless communication and sensing applications above 100 GHz is presented.”
6G Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey (2021, background): “A public blockchain allows anyone to perform transactions and join in the consensus process.”
A Survey of Rate-Optimal Power Domain NOMA With Enabling Technologies of Future Wireless Networks (2019, background): “in [109] highlights several promising applications for communications above 100 GHz in 6G networks, including wireless fiber for back-haul and information showers where a blast of data is sent to the user in a short amount of time as the user passes through an area of coverage at these high frequenc”
The Road to 6G: Ten Physical Layer Challenges for Communications Engineers (2020, methodology): “6G wireless systems will rely on: i) Millimeterwave technologies (30 to 300 GHz); ii) THz technologies (300 GHz to 3 THz); and iii) Free space optics (FSO) [2].”
What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G (2021, background): “• Communication at THz frequencies, putting in play truly enormous bandwidths, allowing for MIMO transmissions even in strict LoS conditions, and further opening the door to a synergistic integration of communication, positioning, and even imaging [122]–[125].”
Wireless Communications With Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface: Path Loss Modeling and Experimental Measurement (2019, background): “Meanwhile, the success of millimeter wave (mmWave) trials and testbeds across the world ensures that mmWave wireless communications will be realized by 2020 [2].”
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An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Terahertz Communications (2020, background): “THz communications are thus expected to enable ultra-high bandwidth and ultra-low latency communication paradigms [26].”
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