Can Terahertz Provide High-Rate Reliable Low-Latency Communications for Wireless VR?

Abstract

Wireless virtual reality (VR), a key 3GPP use case of emerging cellular systems, imposes new visual and haptic requirements directly linked to the Quality of Experience (QoE) of VR users. These QoE requirements can only be met by wireless connectivity that offers high-rate and high-reliability low-latency communications (HR2LLC), unlike the low rates commonly associated with ultrareliable low-latency communication. The high rates for VR over short distances can only be supported by an enormous bandwidth, available in the terahertz (THz)-frequency bands. To explore the potential of THz for meeting HR2LLC requirements, a quantification of the risk for an unreliable VR performance is conducted through a novel and rigorous characterization of the tail of the end-to-end (E2E) delay. Then, a thorough analysis of the Tail-Value-at-Risk (TVaR) is performed to concretely characterize the behavior of extreme wireless events crucial to the real-time VR experience. In particular, the probability distribution function of the THz transmission delay is derived and then used to infer the system reliability scenarios with guaranteed Line of Sight (LoS) as a function of THz network parameters. Numerical results show that abundant bandwidth and low molecular absorption are necessary to improve the reliability. However, their effect remains secondary compared to the availability of LoS, which significantly affects the THz HR2LLC performance. In particular, for scenarios with guaranteed LoS, a reliability of 99.999% (with an E2E delay threshold of 20 ms) for a bandwidth of 15 GHz along with data rates of 18.3 Gbps can be achieved by the THz network, compared to a reliability of 96% for twice the bandwidth, when blockages are considered.