Coverage and achievable rate analysis for indoor terahertz wireless networks

With the emergence of numerous novel dataintensive applications, the demand on fast wireless access is experiencing an unprecedented growth. Following this trend, the “Terabit era” is expected to become a reality in the near future. Terahertz technology is promising as an enabler due to its feature of an extremely high bandwidth. However, due to the high carrier frequency along with a high molecular absorption, the transmission distance is limited to a few meters only. In this work, the coverage problem and the achievable data rate performance of indoor THz wireless networks (THz-WNs) are investigated. In order to overcome the severe propagation loss and to improve the transmission range, a single frequency network (SFN) is advocated. The minimum individual user rate for different resource allocation schemes is analyzed, taking into account the effects of inter-symbol interference due to channel dispersion in the THz band and as a consequence of the SFN transmit protocol. Results demonstrate that the proposed SFN scheme is able to provide a high minimum achievable user data rate. The coverage probability increases from 25% when only a single access point (AP) is employed up to 95% when 20 APs are considered, for an output power of 1 W.

I. Introduction

Over the last few years, the global demand for mobile data services has experienced an explosive growth because of the rapid proliferation of smart mobile devices which need to support high data rates and low latency applications and services. Moreover, recently, both augmented and virtual reality applications have experienced a lot of media attention and are anticipated to evolve rapidly.