Performance Evaluation of Low Sub-THz 5G NR Sidelink for Ultra-Wideband Short-Range Communication

To meet increasing demands for higher-rate communication, exploring the sub-terahertz (THz) band is attracting huge attention. The first standardization of a sub-THz communication was performed at the IEEE 802.15.3d task group, which designed an ultra-wideband short-range communication operating in a 300 GHz band. However, to alleviate hardware challenges, the usage of a much lower-sub-THz band around 100 GHz should also be considered. Moreover, in terms of the advantage of using shared signal processing circuits with the 5G new radio (NR), the frame format should be designed in a compatible manner with the commercially pervasive 5G NR, which cannot be reached by IEEE 802.15.3d. Motivated by these backgrounds, this paper proposes a 5G NR-based ultra-wideband short-range communication operating in a low sub-THz band that lies in 90–110 GHz. This can be achieved by using 5G NR sidelink communication with the bandwidth expansion to several GHz, and no changes are made for the frame format to retain compatibility. This study conducts a performance evaluation of such a 5G NR sidelink system with a 4 GHz bandwidth by using a channel model at the 93–97 GHz band recently developed for device-to-device short-range communications. The evaluation reveals that the proposed communication system using the 5G NR sidelink can achieve the required block error rate (BLER) equal of 0.1 for both control and user-data transmissions even when a 4 GHz bandwidth is utilized. Moreover, it is shown that transmission at a meter-level distance is feasible even when an omnidirectional antenna in an azimuth plane is used.