Last Meter Indoor Terahertz Wireless Access: Performance Insights and Implementation Roadmap

The terahertz band, 0.1-10 THz, has sufficient resources not only to satisfy the 5G requirements of 10 Gb/s peak data rate but to enable a number of tempting rate-greedy applications. However, the terahertz band brings novel challenges, never addressed at lower frequencies. Among others, the scattering of terahertz waves from any object, including walls and furniture, and ultra-wideband highly directional links lead to fundamentally new propagation and interference structures. In this article, we review the recent progress in terahertz propagation modeling, and antenna and testbed designs, and propose a step-by-step roadmap for wireless terahertz Ethernet extension for indoor environments. As a side effect, the described concept provides a second life to the currently underutilized Ethernet infrastructure by using it as a universally available backbone. By applying real terahertz band propagation, reflection, and scattering measurements as well as ray-tracing simulations of a typical office, we analyze two representative scenarios at 300 GHz and 1.25 THz frequencies, illustrating that extremely high rates can be achieved with realistic system parameters at room scales.