A ray tracing-assisted device discovery approach for low terahertz communications

Future wireless communication systems at low terahertz frequencies (0.1-1 THz) suffer from high attenuation losses, and therefore, highly directive antennas are foreseen. As highly directive antennas have narrow beams, the alignment of the transmitter and the receiver is a crucial step in such systems. A device discovery approach using results from ray tracing (RT) combined with an iterative fine tuning is presented by the authors. A summary of previous investigations emphasises the benefits in terms of performance compared to an iterative approach. Furthermore, it indicates strong dependency of the RT output on the accuracy of the input data, that is, the environmental model. The authors extend the previous works by evaluating the impact of antenna characteristics. It is shown that the sidelobes lead to an error in the final alignment due to the superposition of the received power via multipath components, and equations to calculate the maximum error are given. Besides, the impact is evaluated with respect to sidelobe suppression. Here, equations to calculate the maximum error are given and it is shown that the sidelobes do not affect the alignment if the gain of the sidelobe is more than 30 dB lower than that of the mainlobe.