Indoor Mobility Management and Efficient Deployment in the THz

Abstract

There have been substantial technical and policy debates about the spectrum needs of 5G and the necessity of expanding access to a higher frequency spectrum,including in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands from 30 to 275 GHz. The focus, however, has been on bands below 95 GHz, which is the current limit of near-future commercial technologies. As wireless markets continue to grow, demand may arise for spectrum in still higher frequency bands in the sub-millimeter or Terahertz (THz) bands between 275 GHz and 10 THz. THz spectrum offers a promising opportunityto explore an abundance of greenfield spectrum for a variety of future applications. However, the THz spectrum has many challenges associated with deployment, scalability, mobility, efficiency, and viable use-cases. In this thesis, we explore the need for moving to THz band and how multiple technical and policy tools can be used to improve efficient deployment for dense mobile indoor THz systems.Although the implementation of THz communications is nearly a decade away and at the frontiers of technical research, it needs immediate attention from the regulators,operators, manufacturers, and academia. It is worthwhile exploring how THz spectrum might impact wireless network architectures, business/usage cases, and spectrum policy. THz can effectively champion the NextGen communication, for which we propose a framework that can manage the tradeoffs among THz resources and allow us to monitor and allocate these resources more opportunistically. Terahertz Access Points (APs) are susceptible to parameters, such as environmental uncertainties and surface materials, relative location with user equipment(UE), AP and UE density, relative mobility with UEs, antenna gains, infrastructure, and a whole host of regulatory and standards constraints. Properly managing theseparameters will be of critical importance for enabling the use of this higher frequency spectrum. Moreover, in the future, densification, and heterogeneity of APs and UEs will only make the problem more acute. These THz systems will need proper planning and deployment of resources, using technical and public-policy tools, to improve the system performance effectively. Although THz has been envisioned to be deployed for static and nomadic users in an indoor environment, multiple factors, such as small-scale mobility, blockage, and inefficient deployment of resources, can still cause significant outages in the THz. In this thesis, we present a set of technical and policy approaches that can be used for modeling and efficiently deploying indoor THz systems. We address these challenges by presenting four approaches: (a) smart mobility management using machine learning algorithms, (b) analytical model for efficient (power, spectrum and cost) deployment of dense THz-APs, (c) extending user coverage for dense THz- UEs using device-to-device (D2D) communication, and (d) policy analysis for THz spectrum allocation and propose granular resource allocation strategies.