100 Gbps and beyond: Hardware in the Loop experiments with PSSS modulation using 230 GHz RF frontend

The terahertz frequency range provides abundant bandwidth (25GHz ~ 50 GHz) to achieve ultra-high-speed wireless communication and enables data rates up to and above 100 Gbps. Parallel Sequence Spread Spectrum (PSSS) is a physical layer (PHY) baseband technology which is suitable for ultra-high speed wireless communication since the receiver architecture is straightforward and can be implemented almost entirely in analog hardware. In this paper, a PSSS modulated signal at a chip rate of 20 Gcps with a spectral efficiency of 4 bit/s/Hz is transmitted using a 230 GHz RF-front-end operating in the linear range to achieve 80 Gbps. The PSSS transceiver models are implemented in MATLAB/Simulink. The PSSS transmitter generates the PSSS modulated symbols that are loaded into an Arbitrary Waveform generator (AWG) and are then transmitted using the available 230 GHz wireless frontend. A Real-Time Oscilloscope samples and stores the received signal. The PSSS receiver performs synchronization, channel estimation, and demodulation. For a coded data rate of 80 Gbps, a BER of 2.072·10-3 has been measured. Thus, PSSS modulation is the promising modulation technique to achieve a data rate up to or above 100 Gbps in the Terahertz domain.