BRAVE was supporting the organization of the third ETTCOM event (Workshop on Enabling Technologies for Terahertz Communications) collocated with the IEEE virtual PIMRC conference (International Conference on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Communications) on September 13th 2021.

Scope of the ETTCOM workshop

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 several interesting features of THz waves, including the tens and hundreds of gigahertz bandwidths available. 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 many applications in very diverse domains, ranging from Terabit WPAN to Terabit/s file transferring, small backhaul cells, 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.  

Moreover, the application of integration techniques will play a role to reducing the energy consumption and cost while making the system more compact. Apart from hardware issues, the channel modelling of indoor and outdoor (LOS and NLOS propagation modes) THz wave propagation considering different types of environmental and RF constrains remains to be experimentally tested. Although THz technology could satisfy the demand for an ultra-high data rate, several technical challenges need to be overcome or better understood before its development and future deployment.  

The two main missions of this workshop are to expand the visibility of THz/Terabits communications and gather researchers from different research fields that can foster and develop this very fast-growing field. The workshop aims to attract researchers and academics from various fields of study, ranging from signal processing, THz materials and components, services to THz/Terabits communication and networking researchers.

More details on the ETTCOM workshop are available here.

The workshop proposed two keynotes, two scientific papers, and one panel discussion on “THz Communication for 6G: Opportunities, Challenges, and the Road ahead”.

Keynote 2: “FEC for THz communication: challenges from an implementation point of view”, by Norbert Wehn, University of Kaiserlautern, Germany. PDF Presentation.

Scientific paper 1: “A New Look to THz Wireless Links: Fading Modeling and Capacity Assessment”, by Evangelos N. Papasotiriou and Alexandros-Apostolos A Boulogeorgos (University of Piraeus, Greece); Katsuyuki Haneda (Aalto University, Finland); Mar Francis De Guzman (Aalto University, Finland & Advanced Science and Technology Institute, Philippines); Angeliki Alexiou (University of Piraeus, Greece). PDF Presentation.

Scientific paper 2: “THz Channel Model for 6G Communications“, by Zahed Hossain, Clara (Qian) Li, Dawei Ying and Geng Wu (Intel Corporation, USA); Cong Xiong (ASR Microelectronics International Inc., USA). PDF presentation.