Optimizing Service Areas in 6G mmWave/THz Systems with Dual Blockage and Micromobility

The modern 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) New Radio (NR) systems as well as future terahertz (THz) radio access technologies (RAT) will heavily rely on beamforming to combat the excessive path losses. Additionally, both RATs target similar bandwidth-greedy non-elastic traffic and are affected by the blockage phenomena. To improve service reliability in these systems multiconnectivity can be utilized to dynamically hand over the ongoing sessions between two technologies. In this article, we investigate the association strategies in collocated deployments of mmWave/THz systems and evaluate the impact of the utilized antenna arrays. Our results show that accepting sessions to THz BS that may experience outage in blocked conditions is preferable when multiconnecitvity is utilized as compared to accepting them to mmWave BS. However, extending the coverage of THz base station (BS) by increasing the number of antenna elements slightly affects performance metrics. Nevertheless, there is still non-negligible probability of dropping sessions accepted for service, implying that in 6G deployments the support of fully reliable microwave technology such as sub-6 GHz NR is vital.

Automated summary

The modern 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) and future terahertz (THz) radio access technologies heavily use beamforming and face similar challenges with non-elastic traffic and blockage phenomena. Multiconnectivity is effective in improving service reliability by dynamically handing over sessions between the two technologies. This article investigates association strategies in collocated mmWave/THz deployments and evaluates the impact of antenna arrays. Results show that accepting sessions to THz base stations is preferable with multiconnectivity, but extending THz base station coverage has minimal performance impact.