Wideband Channel Characterization for 6G Networks in Industrial Environments

Abstract

Wireless data traffic has increased significantly due to the rapid growth of smart terminals and evolving real-time technologies. With the dramatic growth of data traffic, the existing cellular networks including Fifth-Generation (5G) networks cannot fully meet the increasingly rising data rate requirements. The Sixth-Generation (6G) mobile network is expected to achieve the high data rate requirements of new transmission technologies and spectrum. This paper presents the radio channel measurements to study the channel characteristics of 6G networks in the 107–109 GHz band in three different industrial environments. The path loss, K-factor, and time dispersion parameters are investigated. Two popular path loss models for indoor environments, the close-in free space reference distance (CI) and floating intercept (FI), are used to examine the path loss. The mean excess delay (MED) and root mean squared delay spread (RMSDS) are used to investigate the time dispersion of the channel. The path loss results show that the CI and FI models fit the measured data well in all industrial settings with a path loss exponent (PLE) of 1.6–2. The results of the K-factor show that the high value in industrial environments at the sub-6 GHz band still holds well in our measured environments at a high frequency band above 100 GHz. For the time dispersion parameters, it is found that most of the received signal energy falls in the early delay bins. This work represents a first step to establish the feasibility of using 6G networks operating above 100 GHz for industrial applications.

TeraMIMO: A Channel Simulator for Wideband Ultra-Massive MIMO Terahertz Communications

“…An extension in [42] introduces a hybrid indoor THz channel model combining both RT and statistical methods. In [43], measurement-based sub-THz (107 − 109 GHz) channel characteristics are captured for industrial environments.…”

A Survey of NOMA for VLC Systems: Research Challenges and Future Trends

“…The frequency band (95 GHz-3 THz) has been assigned for the next wireless technology sixth generation (6G) research to fulfill the huge demands for future data traffic according to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) [9,10]. Nevertheless, one of the main technical problems of deploying 6G systems is to overcome the high propagation and atmospheric absorption of THz frequencies, which require a new design for the transceiver [11,12]. Many researchers recently consider optical wireless communication (OWC) including ultraviolet (UV), infrared (IR) and visible light (VL) as an attractive complementary and alternative technique of RF.…”

Energy-Efficient Tethered UAV Deployment in B5G for Smart Environments and Disaster Recovery

“…Moreover, UAV flying is a limited battery capacity during coverage services in disaster scenarios [12]. Furthermore, gathering data from the Internet of Things (IoT) using UAVs also suffers from data processing and transferring due to limited battery charge [13], [14]. Therefore, the authors of [15] applied an artificial neural network for predicting the signal strength over IoT devices in smart environments based on optimized location and UAV trajectory.…”