A1: Accuracy of THz Communications Measurement Systems

• Applicants: Privatdozent Dr.-Ing. Thomas Kleine-Ostmann; Professor Dr. Thomas Schneider; Professor Dr.-Ing. Reiner Thomä
• Subject Area: Communication Technology and Networks, High-Frequency Technology and Photonic Systems, Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Information Technology
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403579441

In the second phase of the project A1 (Accuracy of THz Communications Measurement Systems), based on traceability provided by project T, investigation of the two main measurement systems necessary for THz communications, channel sounding and optical sampling, will be further extended towards new technologies, approaches and scenarios. As reference artefacts turned out to be the major route towards establishing traceability for advanced channel sounder architectures and model-based parameter estimation, further work by PI Thomä and PI Kleine-Ostmann as basis for A2 and projects in area B and C will concentrate on advanced waveguide and over-the-air artefacts to evaluate high-resolution parameter estimation performance with regard to specular propagation parameters delay, direction, Doppler, and diffuse scattering. This will include the definition, implementation and characterization of new artefacts such as lines, edges, corners, cavities, etc. These canonical objects represent dominating building blocks of the propagation environment. They are required to evaluate object recognition schemes if the THz communication system is used in parallel for radar sensing (e.g. simultaneous localization and mapping). To keep pace with increasing demands and to restrict the required spectral efficiencies for signal processing and transmission, higher data rates need increased baseband width. Thus, PI Schneider and PI Kleine-Ostmann will investigate the accuracy of frequency- and time-domain methods for a parallelization of an incoming high-bandwith signal into several signals with lower bandwidths as basis for A3. Based on waveform metrology, we will compare the different methods regarding their accuracy, and we will especially investigate the additional error and the resulting effective number of bit (ENOB) reduction. Especially for the frequency-domain method of spectrum slicing we will investigate the non-idealities of integrated filter functions and their influence on the accuracy.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 2863: Metrology for THz Communications