2025/08/30 by Liesbet Van der Perre, Van der Perre, Liesbet, Gilles Callebaut +13
Engineering · #Advanced Photonic Communication Systems #FOS: Electrical engineering #Millimeter-Wave Propagation and Modeling #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #Wireless Body Area Networks #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.00492
openalex publication_date 2025/08/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The vast bandwidth available at sub-THz frequencies holds great promise for high-speed wireless access, precise localization, and advanced sensing applications. However, fundamental physical constraints and technological limitations make the deployment of reliable sub-THz networks challenging. We propose a new paradigm for sub-THz coverage by transmitting the RF signals over polymer microwave fibers (PMFs) that interconnect low-complexity radio units (RUs) in a daisy-chain configuration. The distributed architecture ensures that user equipments (UEs) connect to RUs in their proximity, reducing path loss and mitigating blocking. The RUs leverage low-complexity, compact integrated antenna modules. Additionally, dual-frequency tandem operation is proposed, integrating the sub-THz system with a sub-10 GHz system that provides control signalling and a robust fallback solution for the sub-THz system. This proposed tandem architecture can open up the full potential of sub-THz technology and paves the way to cost- and energy-efficient, high-performance, real-time connectivity in dynamic environments.