2021 - 4TH WORKSHOP ON TERAHERTZ COMMUNICATIONS

Over the last few years, wireless data traffic has drastically increased due to a change in the way today’s society creates, shares and consumes information. In parallel to the massive growth in the total number of mobile connected devices, there has been an increasing demand for higher speed wireless communication anywhere, anytime. Wireless data rates have doubled every eighteen months for the last three decades. Following this trend, Terabit-per-second (Tbps) links will become a reality within the next five years.
In this context, Terahertz (THz)-band (0.1–10 THz) communication is envisioned as a key wireless technology to satisfy such demand, and is regarded as one pillar technology for 6G. This frequency band, which lies in between millimeter-waves and the far infrared, remains still one of the least explored regions in the EM spectrum. For many decades, the lack of compact high-power signal sources and high-sensitivity detectors able to work at room temperature has hampered the use of the THz band for any application beyond sensing. However, many recent advancements with different technologies is finally closing the so-called THz gap. For example, on the one hand, in an electronic approach, III-V semiconductor technologies have demonstrated record performance in terms of output power, noise figure, and power-added efficiency at sub-THz frequencies, and are quickly approaching the 1 THz mark. On the other hand, in a photonic approach, optical down-conversion systems and quantum cascade lasers are rising as potential candidates for high-power high-speed THz-band communication systems. More recently, the use of nanomaterials such as graphene is enabling the development of novel plasmonic devices, which intrinsically operate in the THz-band.
THz-band communication brings many new opportunities to the wireless communication community. The very large available bandwidth at THz-band frequencies (at least several hundreds of GHz) will alleviate the spectrum scarcity problems and capacity limitations of current wireless networks, and enable new applications in the consumer, industrial, medical and military fields, including Terabit WPAN for multimedia kiosks, Terabit WLAN for indoor small cells, outdoor wireless backhaul provisioning and space/satellite communications. In addition, the very small size of THz transceivers and antennas can be leveraged to enable the communication between nanoscale devices, including biological nanosensors for healthcare systems, massive multi-core wireless networks on chip, and the Internet of Nano-Things.
Nevertheless, this very large bandwidth comes at the cost of a very high propagation loss, mainly because of molecular absorption, which also creates a unique distance dependence on the available bandwidth. All these introduce many challenges to practical THz communication systems and require the development of innovative solutions. Moreover, many of these might be helpful for broadband wireless communication systems below and above the THz band, i.e., mm-waves and optical wireless communications, respectively.
In this workshop, the covered topics include but are not limited to THz transceivers, antennas and antenna arrays; information theoretic analysis of THz communication systems, THz channel modeling, estimation and equalization techniques; ultra-broadband modulation and waveform design; beamforming, precoding and space-time coding schemes; MAC design and interference management; relaying and routing in ultra- broadband networks; system-level modeling and experimental platforms and demonstrations.