Performance Analysis of Dual-Hop THz Wireless Transmission for Backhaul Applications

Abstract: THz transmissions suffer from pointing errors due to antenna misalignment and incur higher path loss from the molecular absorption in addition to the channel fading. In this paper, we employ an amplify-and-forward (AF) dual-hop relaying to mitigate the effect of pointing errors and extend the range of the THz wireless system for backhaul connectivity. We provide statistical analysis on the performance of the considered system by deriving analytical expressions for the outage probability, average bit-error-rate (BER), average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and a lower bound on the ergodic capacity over independent and identical (i.i.d) $\alpha$-$\mu$ fading combined with the statistical effect of pointing errors. Using computer simulations, we validate the derived analysis of the relay-assisted system. We also demonstrate the effect of the system parameters on outage probability and average BER with the help of diversity order. We show that data rates up to several \mbox{Gbps} can be achieved using THz transmissions, which is desirable for next-generation wireless systems, especially for backhaul applications.