Photonics-aided exceeding 200-Gb/s wireless data transmission over outdoor long-range 2 × 2 MIMO THz links at 300 GHz

Abstract

Outdoor long-range terahertz (THz) communications often come at the expense of transmission rate. Moreover, the practicability of the single polarization optical/THz link, which is commonly used in the previous long-range THz demonstrations based on photonics, is extremely limited by the following two fatal defects. One is relying on active polarization control, and the other is not supporting the transparent bridging of optical polarization division multiplexed (PDM) signals for mature coherent optical communication networks. In this work, a large-capacity photonics-aided THz wireless communication system based on the outdoor long-range 2 × 2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) links has been successfully demonstrated. We first build the 200-m 2 × 2 MIMO THz wireless links at the 300 GHz band. The cascaded linear and nonlinear equalizers are proposed which can significantly improve the transmission performance of 100- and 200-Gb/s PDM quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signals. Then an interesting 2 × 2 MIMO structure which can provide certain diversity reception gain under 200-m long-range wireless delivery using the same polarization scheme is also presented and further compared with the orthogonal polarization scheme. Since each THz receiver simultaneously receives data from both the two THz transmitters for this MIMO links, an improvement over 6 dB in receiving sensitivity and one order of magnitude in bit error ratio performance under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions can be achieved. Finally, based on the proposed cascaded equalizers and novel 2 × 2 MIMO structure, we successfully demonstrate a record-breaking 58-Gbaud (232-Gb/s) PDM-QPSK signal transmission over 200-m 2 × 2 MIMO THz wireless links. This is an important attempt for the photonics-aided THz wireless communication systems to achieve 2 × 2 MIMO transmission over a long wireless distance in the outdoors. Furthermore, attaining over 200 Gb/s at a wireless distance of 200 m also represents a key milestone for the long-range and large-capacity THz wireless communication systems.