60 Gbit/s THz Communication Hybrid Propagation Through Hollow Core Fibre and Over-The-Air

Abstract

Terahertz (THz) frequencies have become a promising candidate for 6G communications technology due to the large continuous bandwidths available allowing for a large increase in peak data rate, compared to frequencies currently utilised in 5G. As THz Over-The-Air (OTA) signals are blocked by environmental obstacles such as building walls, short lengths (<5 m) of fibre capable of carrying THz data signals would allow for through-the-wall high-speed communication. In this work, a demonstration of data transmission through a 17 cm bent TOPAS hollow-core anti-resonant fibre is presented. A maximum data rate of 60 Gbit/s, using a QAM 64 modulation format is achieved with a Bit Error Ratio (BER) of 2.4×10^-2 which is below the SD-FEC threshold of 2.7×10^-2. This was achieved by transmitting the signal first through the THz fibre and then OTA over a ∼1.7 m Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) beam path. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first published demonstration of a hybrid fibre-to-OTA beam path at 250 GHz.