Fast and Accurate Terahertz Beam Management via Frequency-Dependent Beamforming

Terahertz (THz) communication is envisaged as an attractive way to attain abundant spectrum resources for 6G wireless communications. One main difficulty of the THz communications is the severe attenuation of signal power caused by the high diffraction and penetration losses and atmospheric absorption. To compensate for the severe path loss, a beamforming technique realized by the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has been widely used. Since the beamforming gain is maximized only when the beams are appropriately aligned with the signal propagation paths, acquisition of accurate beam directions is of paramount importance. A major issue of the conventional beam management schemes is the considerable latency being proportional to the number of training beams. In this paper, we propose a THz beam management technique that simultaneously generates multiple frequency-dependent beams using the true time delay (TTD)-based phase shifters. By closing the gap between the frequency-dependent beamforming vectors and the desired directional beamforming vectors using the TTD-based signal propagation network called intensifier, we generate very sharp training beams maximizing the beamforming gain. From the numerical results, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves more than 70% reduction in the beam management latency and 60% increase in the data rate.