Combating the Distance Problem in the Millimeter Wave and Terahertz Frequency Bands

By Ian F. Akyildiz, Chong Han, Shuai Nie. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2018

413 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the millimeter-wave (30-300 GHz) and terahertz (0.1-10 THz) frequency bands, the high spreading loss and molecular absorption often limit the signal transmission distance and coverage range. In this article, four directions to tackle the crucial problem of distance limitation are investigated, namely, a distance-aware physical layer design, ultra-massive MIMO communication, reflectarrays, and intelligent surfaces. Additionally, the potential joint design of these solutions is proposed to combine the benefits and further extend the communication distance. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations are provided to illustrate the benefits of the proposed solutions. The feasibility of mmWave and THz band communications up to 100 m in both line-of-sight and nonline- of-sight areas are demonstrated.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8eeb347e26011cfa4bdf20146d5d3e8900f17bb9

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Citations in the corpus

6G and Beyond: The Future of Wireless Communications Systems (2020, background): “tance because of the remarkably high path loss inherent to small wavelengths and the limited transmission power of mmWave and THz-band transceivers [56].”
A Comprehensive Survey on Millimeter Wave Communications for Fifth-Generation Wireless Networks: Feasibility and Challenges (2020, methodology): “In [326], basic link budget calculations show that signal attenuation at THz frequencies amounts to around 103.4 dB, with the challenge of too low received signal level, to successfully demodulate the information-bearing signal.”
Path Loss Modeling and Measurements for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces in the Millimeter-Wave Frequency Band (2021, methodology): “However, a major issue for enabling wireless communications in the mmWave and THz bands is the large path loss, especially when the transmission path is blocked by obstacles [2].”
Wireless Communications With Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface: Path Loss Modeling and Experimental Measurement (2019, background): “Looking forward to future 6G wireless communication technologies, one possibility is to further extend the spectrum to the terahertz (THz) band [5] and the antenna array scale to ultra-massive MIMO (UM-MIMO) [6], [7], which can further boost the spatial diversity and expand the available spectrum re”
STAR: Simultaneous Transmission and Reflection for 360° Coverage by Intelligent Surfaces (2021, background): “…research efforts have been devoted to the investigation of RISs, including but not limited to the design of energy efﬁcient communication [5], the mitigation of blockages in millimeter wave (mmWave)/terahertz (THz) communications [6], and their artiﬁcial intelligence (AI) aided implementation [7].”
An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Terahertz Communications (2020, background): “ces at the device level. Boulogeorgos et al. [90] - 2018 Highlightes how THz can deliver optical network quality; also touches on the channel, baseband challenges, and on beamforming. Akyildiz et al. [91] - 2018 Highlights the importance of MIMO conﬁgurations and distance-adaptive solutions to exten”
Multi-Hop RIS-Empowered Terahertz Communications: A DRL-Based Hybrid Beamforming Design (2021, background): “bandwidth is still less than 10 GHz, which is difficult to offer Tbps data rates [1], [2], [4]–[8], [13], [14].”
Terahertz Band Communication: An Old Problem Revisited and Research Directions for the Next Decade (2021, background): “In our prior work [19], four directions to tackle the crucial problem of distance limitation are investigated, including distance-aware physical layer design, ultra-massive MIMO communication, reﬂectarrays, and intelligent surfaces.”
White Paper on Broadband Connectivity in 6G (2020, background): “On the one hand, the much higher spreading losses (resulting from the much smaller wavelength of THz signals) combined with the low power of THz transmitters makes increasing the communication distance the grand challenge [72].”
Channel Estimation for RIS-Empowered Multi-User MISO Wireless Communications (2020, methodology): “RIS-assisted communications were recently investigated in the millimeter wave (mmWave) and Terahertz (THz) bands, where RIS was employed to solve the limited transmission distance problem [20].”
Holographic MIMO Surfaces for 6G Wireless Networks: Opportunities, Challenges, and Trends (2019, background): “By independently and continuously controlling the bias voltage of the varactors, the surface impedance of continuous HMIMOS can be dynamically programmed, and thus manipulate the reflection phase, amplitude states, and the phase distribution over a wide range of frequency bands [1].”
Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research (2021, background): “6G will be deployed across large number of areas through the fixed wireless access, which will leverage 6G technologies to deliver wireless broadband to everywhere on the planet [165].”
6G Wireless Communications: Vision and Potential Techniques (2019, methodology): “Post-massive MIMO (PM-MIMO) techniques, such as ultra-massive MIMO (UM-MIMO) for terahertz comminations, may support hundreds to thousands of transmit/receive antennas, for example, the (Nr, Nt) = (1024  1024)-element UM-MIMO design for 1 THz transmissions [4].”
MIMO Transmission Through Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface: System Design, Analysis, and Implementation (2019, background): “Looking ahead to what technologies may deliver 6G, extending the spectrum to the terahertz (THz) band [5] and upscaling massive MIMO (resulting in ultra-massive MIMO (UM-MIMO) [6]), appear to be a natural next step.”