Release of Deliverable D1.2: Final regulation status, Scenarios, and Requirements updates, Nov. 2019.

Enhanced or new wireless broadband applications will be enabled by the exploitation of sub-THz frequencies between 90 GHz and 300 GHz, arising with next 6G mobile network generation. Three main use case families are targeted: high-capacity backhaul; enhanced short-range hotspot; and device-to device communications. This deliverable D1.2 gives an updated definition of use cases and requirements that were first published in deliverable D1.0 in November 2018, and then were considered in BRAVE studies.

Besides, the two-fold BRAVE paradigm is exposed for the physical sub-THz layer that answers those use cases either with ultra-high data rates or a broadband low-complexity (and low-energy) system or in-between compromises.

The status on international and French sub-THz regulation remains roughly unchanged since the publication of our previous deliverable D1.1 in December 2019.

Finally, investigations on future 6G technologies, applications, requirements, and impacts are gaining more and more intensity since 2018. This document gives a brief overview on few relevant publications (often in the form of white papers) sharing the vision of major equipment vendors, industry alliances, or researchers, on 6G communications and sub-THz/THz spectrum exploitation.

Release of D3.1: Performance assessments, Nov. 2019.

After definition of beyond-5G scenarios and new spectrum opportunities in work-package WP1 of BRAVE project, elaboration of new models for the sub-THz physical layer and design of adapted efficient waveforms within work-package WP2, the proposed solutions are demonstrated in work-package WP3.
More precisely, the work-package WP3 has two main goals. First, it consists in integrating the building blocks developed in work-package WP2 for evaluation in a more sophisticated and realistic simulation environment. Second, it must produce evaluation results to assess the feasibility and interest of the proposed solutions and scenarios, but also feed the demonstration and promotion tasks. The wireless systems performance are evaluated based on different metrics: data rate, bit error rate, coverage range, network capacity, and power consumption.

Deliverable D3.1 describes and assesses the performance of the WP2 investigated concepts in five scenarios.

– Scenario #1: Fixed wireless Access (FWA). Based on a fine model of the environment and the performance abstraction of the single carrier P-QAM modulation, results and statistical analysis are discussed. The network deployment optimization is designed with an automatic planning tool.

– Scenario #2: Indoor Wireless backhaul in a shopping mall. In this use case, a shopping-mall area with strong required capacity for mobile and fixed wireless connectivity is investigated. As for scenario #1, Single carrier P-QAM modulation is assumed to derive figure of merits of the sub-THz network.

– Scenario #3: Kiosk and enhance WLAN in an office environment. Based on a fine model of the channel propagation in an office area, the potential of the index modulation schemes (e.g., GSM, DP-GSM and FSIM) is demonstrated from different perspectives (e.g., spectral/energy efficiencies, robustness to PN, cost and computational complexity). In addition, a link budget estimation demonstrates the order of magnitude of the energy consumption for the envisaged schemes. Different configurations (number of antennas, indexation strategies) are investigated, discussed and compared.

– Scenario #4: Hotspot with very low complexity transceiver. The considered scenario is a small hotspot area for which a low complexity non-coherent receiver based on the concatenation of a LDPC coded OOK modulator / energy detector is investigated and compared to a coherent receiver with P-QAM modulation.

– Scenario #5: Short-range D2D. This last scenario explores the feasibility of providing short-range subTHz connectivity between devices with low complexity. For this use case, two strategies are discussed. On the one hand, we present a solution combining spatial multiplexing (with up to 8 antennas) and non-coherent receiver to increase the spectral efficiency. On the other hand, a coherent receiver using MIMO Filter Shape index modulation (FSIM) is investigated to reach much higher spectral and energy efficiencies at a low cost.

Many data sets describing the modulation and the channel realization used for the numerical simulations are open. We provide a description of how to use them in appendices.