Chinese lab achieves major achievement in wireless communication

A high-tech laboratory in Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu Province, has announced a major achievement related to 6G-oriented terahertz 100/200Gbps (gigabits per second) real-time wireless communication, with a transmission rate 10-20 times higher than 5G networks.

With the support of the national key research and development plan for 6G, the first 360-430GHz terahertz 100/200Gbps real-time wireless transmission communication experimental system was built.

That led to the fastest real-time transmission for terahertz real-time wireless communication that's been publicly reported in the world, according to a post by the Purple Mountain Laboratories on Wednesday.

Adopting the photonic terahertz technology route, that is generating terahertz signals through two higher-frequency lightwave beat frequencies, a single-wavelength net rate of 103.125Gbps and a dual-wavelength net rate of 206.25Gbps was achieved for the first time in real-time wireless transmission, the laboratory said.

Terahertz wireless communication is considered to be the core technology of 6G networks. 

The terahertz frequency band, ranging from 300GHz to 3THz, is rich in frequency resources, which can support 100Gbps-1Tbps (terabits per second, which is equal to 1,000Gbps) ultra-high-speed wireless communication.

This will increase the peak transmission speed of the existing 5G system, which can serve future 6G holographic communication, the metaverse and other new applications.

The achievement has a wide range of application prospects, according to Purple Mountain. It can be integrated with existing fiber optical networks to expand 100-1000Gbps outdoor and indoor ultra-high-speed wireless access, replace the existing mobile network fiber optical networks to achieve rapid deployment, and replace the huge amount of cables in the data center to significantly reduce costs and power consumption. 

In the future, it can also be installed in satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles and airships, which can be applied to high-speed wireless communication scenarios between satellite clusters, between the sky and the Earth, and between satellites of more than 1,000 kilometers.

"The achievement is very much in line with the country's technology development direction and further secures China's leading position in the wireless communication sector," Xiang Ligang, director-general of the telecom industry association Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Compared with the millimeter wave (mmWave), the terahertz waves possess higher frequencies. As a result, terahertz waves will convey data more quickly at the expense of limited signal propagation distance, which poses challenges to its large-scale application, Xiang noted.

The 5G network uses the frequency bands in the 24 GHz to 100 GHz range, known as the mmWave.