We have now released the tenth episode of the podcast Wireless Future, with the following abstract:
5G promises peak data speeds above 1 gigabit per second. Looking further into the future, will wireless technology eventually deliver 1 terabit per second? How can the technology be evolved to reach that goal, and what would the potential use cases be? In this episode, Erik G. Larsson and Emil Björnson provide answers to these questions and discuss the practical challenges that must be overcome at the hardware level and in wireless propagation. To learn more, they recommend the article “Scoring the Terabit/s Goal: Broadband Connectivity in 6G”.
You can watch the video podcast on YouTube:
You can listen to the audio-only podcast at the following places:
The big question is how to reach the Terabit-goal without excessively increasing the power consumption.
Consider that there is an energy-cost in moving a bit of information from point A to point B in space (some pJ/bit number). Assuming that we’re trying to increase the throughput by a factor of 100, going from 10Gbps to 1Tbps, we need to decrease this energy-cost by the same factor, only to keep the total energy-cost fixed.
I think this will be the larger challenge in the end.
This is indeed a big challenge. The radiated power can be compensated for by shortening the propagation distances, but the dissipation in the transceiver hardware cannot be dealt with in the same way. On the other hand, I think we are far from the limits on energy efficiency: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.01688.pdf