Terahertz Wireless Communications: Recent Developments Including a Prototype System for Short-Range Data Downloading
Ho-Jin Song
Abstract
Nowadays, it is hard to imagine daily life without connecting to cellular communications or wireless local area networks. People are not just accessing digital information in real time but also watching movies and enjoying multimedia data streaming services even in vehicles traveling at high speeds. Technically, contemporary wireless communications systems rely primarily on massive signal processing for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing and channel estimation/calibration, which has resulted in dramatically enhanced spectral efficiency and channel reliability. As society evolves toward a more data- and network-oriented world, data consumers and providers are seeking more advanced communications systems that offer larger data capacity. Therefore, a top priority is to find ways to overcome the limits on capacity due to narrow bandwidths. It is not easy to define the target throughput that should be accommodated in the next decade, but considering the new radio 5G cellular system offering up to 10 Gb/s, the huge spectral resources provided by submillimeter or terahertz (THz) wavebands are attracting a great deal of attention from research communities for future wireless communications systems [1], [2].