TERAhertz integrated systems enabling 6G Terabit-per-second ultra-massive MIMO wireless networks

TERA6G aims at developing disruptive photonic wireless transceivers enabling Terabit-per-second data throughput capacity and massive Multiple-Input/Multiple-Output multi-antenna techniques operating in the millimeter-wave (30 GHz to 300 GHz) and Terahertz (300 GHz to 3 THz) bands of the spectrum, unlocking the “Fiber-over-the-Air” concept. The concept uses independently steerable wireless pencil-beams with fiber data throughput capacity, allowing mobile site connectivity scenarios in dense urban areas with macro/street level densification, temporal mobile site connectivity in ad-hoc networks, and connectivity to moving objects in public or private networks.

Hybrid photonic integration is the key enabler technology to develop a Blass-Matrix Transmitter and an incoherent-multi-band Receiver with key disruptive characteristics, including agility (handling any modulation scheme and continuous tuning of the carrier frequency across the target spectrum range), scalability (handling large number of beams with 2-dimensional antenna arrays for beamformed antenna gain >25 dBi and > 100º steering angles beam-steering) and reconfigurability (performing a variety of functions, from wireless data transmission, or radar ranging to channel sounding).

These disruptive wireless transceiver modules characteristics will be exploited at network level by developing the dynamic allocation of the network resources that these bring. We plan to dynamically analyze the position of the different wireless nodes and the channel resources using respectively the radar ranging and channel sounding techniques enabled by the novel reconfigurable TERA6G photonic transceivers. This will allow for novel scheduling methods capable of alternating paths to establish the connectivity, ensuring connection reliability, and considering energy consumption in the establishment of the wireless link.

TERA6G is the crossroad of previous H2020 projects TERAWAY, ARIADNE, TERRANOVA and FUDGE-5G.