Learning-based visibility prediction for terahertz communications in 6G networks

Abstract

Terahertz communications are envisioned as a key enabler for 6G networks. The abundant spectrum available in such ultra high frequencies has the potential to increase network capacity to huge data rates. However, they are extremely affected by blockages, to the point of disrupting ongoing communications. In this paper, we elaborate on the relevance of predicting visibility between users and access points (APs) to improve the performance of THz-based networks by minimizing blockages, that is, maximizing network availability, while at the same time keeping a low reconfiguration overhead. We propose a novel approach to address this problem, by combining a neural network (NN) for predicting future user-AP visibility probability, with a probability threshold for AP reselection to avoid unnecessary reconfigurations. Our experimental results demonstrate that current state-of-the-art handover mechanisms based on received signal strength are not adequate for THz communications, since they are ill-suited to handle hard blockages. Our proposed NN-based solution significantly outperforms them, demonstrating the interest of our strategy as a research line.

arXiv commentArticle published in Computer Communications journal

References in corpus (4)

• Position and Orientation Estimation through Millimeter Wave MIMO in 5G Systems
• Terahertz Communications (TeraCom): Challenges and Impact on 6G Wireless Systems
• Beam Management in Ultra-dense mmWave Network via Federated Reinforcement Learning: An Intelligent and Secure Approach
• Spectrum Allocation with Adaptive Sub-band Bandwidth for Terahertz Communication Systems