Scientific THz authors are warmly invited to submit at the ICASSP special session by October 21th.

The 45th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) is expecting more than 3000 participants in Barcelona, May 4-8 2020. The BRAVE project is associated to the French research laboratory IETR to support the special session entitled “Towards Terabits/Terahertz Wireless Communications for B5G Era”.

Terahertz (THz) technology, or what is more and more labelled by the scientific community as beyond 5G communication systems, has attracted a great interest from academia and industry. This is due to a number of interesting features of THz waves, including the tens and hundreds of gigahertz bandwidths available, and the fact that this frequency band poses only a minor health threat. Also, as millimetre-wave communication systems mature, the focus of research is, naturally, moving to the THz range. With the increase in bandwidth requirements, the D bands (110-170 GHz) and then the H bands (220-330 GHz) are being increasingly studied for future communication applications. Broad bandwidth of the THz frequency bands can be used for terabit-per-second (Tb/s) wireless indoor communication systems.

With the attractive feature of ultra-broadband, the exploitation of THz band for future wireless/optical communication has become a hot topic in last years. Although lots of research efforts have been undertaken with state-of-the-art devices and channel propagation, THz techniques are still not enough mature compared to microwave or photonics. As THz for wireless communication cannot be simply implemented with existing techniques, some key issues remain to be addressed before completing their deployment and commercialization. The first and most important is the availability of high performance devices including powerful THz sources, high gain antennas and sensitive THz detectors, for overcoming the physical attenuations from free space link.

The THz band gives access to a large amount of applications in very diverse domains, ranging from Terabit WPAN to Terabit/s file transferring, small cells backhaul, server farms, or virtual and augmented reality applications. Nevertheless, there are many challenges from the device, communication and networking perspectives, which require fundamentally new solutions.

The papers selected for this special session will bring innovative solutions and developments related to the use of specific and energetically efficient waveforms to achieve terabit/s in THz channels, with power-efficient architectures towards THz communications. Novel solutions are investigated to achieve a throughput higher than 100 Gb/s with current semiconductor technology, and in antenna design field using innovative materials to enable technologies in the sub-Terahertz range.

Organizer 1: Dr. Faouzi Bader (CentraleSupélec-France) / faouzi.bader@supelec.fr.

Organizer 2: Prof. Catherine Douillard (IMT-Atlantique-France) / catherine.douillard@imt-atlantique.fr.