Impact of deployment on energy efficiency of sub-THz transmission

Abstract

Sub-THz bands are promising high bandwidth and data rates, and in the recent years the device technologies made large progress and provided a multitude of transceiver, power amplifier (PA) and phased array devices supporting the frequency bands above 100 GHz. The more painful aspect of sub-THz transmission is the increased power consumption, caused by the large data rates and the related data conversion and processing effort, and on the analog side the low achievable PA efficiency and the reduced achievable output power. When planning a deployment of sub-THz communication systems, the target coverage and throughput can be achieved with a variety of scenarios, which will be different with respect to locations and number of base stations and system architectures. Although leading to similar performance, they will differ significantly in the overall power consumption. With an accurate power consumption model, including also baseband (BB) processing functionality, and system level simulations for different hybrid beamforming and MIMO schemes the related variations in power consumption in relation to a given performance are evaluated. This paper shows the critical design aspects for energy efficient sub-THz deployments by highlighting the sub- THz specific trade-offs between different number of BS with different transmit powers but also changing number of BB units and RF chains.