On the advances of terahertz communication for 5G and beyond wireless networks

Abstract

Digital revolution and recent advances in telecommunications technology enable one to design communication systems that operate within the regions close to the theoretical capacity limits. Ever-increasing demand for wireless communications and emerging numerous high -capacity services and applications mandate providers to employ more bandwidth (BW)-oriented solutions to meet the requirements. Trend and predictions point out that marketplace targets data rates around 10 Gbps or even more within the upcoming decade. It is clear that such rates could only be achieved by employing more BW with the state-of-the-art technology. Considering the fact that bands in the range of 0.1-10 terahertz (THz), which are known as THz bands, are not allocated yet for specific active services around the globe, there is an enormous potential to achieve the desired data rates. Although THz bands look promising to achieve data rates on the order of several tens of Gbps, realization of fully operational THz communications systems obliges to carry out a multidisciplinary effort, including statistical propagation and channel characterizations, adaptive transceiver designs, reconfigurable platforms, advanced signal -processing algorithms and techniques along with upper layer protocols equipped with various security and privacy levels. Thus, this chapter provides an overview on the open issues, and the state-of-t