Towards 100 Gbps Wireless Communication in THz Band with PSSS Modulation: A Promising Hardware in the Loop Experiment

Abstract

Terahertz frequency band of 0.06 - 10 THz is especially interesting for ultra-high-speed wireless communication to achieve data rates of 100 Gbps or higher. To accommodate this demand, advanced terahertz signal processing techniques need to be investigated. Parallel Sequence Spread Spectrum (PSSS) is a physical layer (PHY) baseband technology that seems to be suited for being used for ultra-high speed wireless communication since the receiver architecture is especially simple and can be implemented almost completely in analog hardware. In this paper, a PSSS modulated signal at a chip rate of 20 Gcps with a spectral efficiency of (only) 1 bit/s/Hz is transmitted using a linearity limited 240 GHz wireless frontend. PSSS transceiver models are realized offline in MATLAB/Simulink. The PSSS transmitter generates the PSSS modulated symbols that are loaded onto an Arbitrary Waveform generator (AWG) and then transmitted using the available 240 GHz wireless frontend. A Digital Storage Oscilloscope (DSO) samples and stores the received signal. The PSSS receiver performs synchronization, channel estimation and demodulation. For a coded data rate of 20 Gbps, an eye opening of 40% and a BER of 5.4·10-5 has been measured. These results are highly promising to achieve data rates of up to 100 Gbps with PSSS modulation using a RF-frontend having higher linear operating range and thus allowing increasing the bandwidth efficiency to 4 b/s/Hz.