Performance comparison of single-carrier and multi-carrier waveforms over terahertz wireless channels

Terahertz (THz) wireless communication has been recognized as a powerful technology to meet the ever-increasing demand of ultra-high rate services. In order to achieve efficient and reliable wireless communications over THz bands, it is extremely necessary to find an appropriate waveform for THz communications. In this paper, performance comparison of various single-carrier and multi-carrier waveforms over THz channels will be provided. Specifically, first, a system model for terahertz communication is briefly described, which includes amplifier nonlinearity, propagation characteristic, phase noise, etc. Then, the transceiver architectures related to both single-carrier and multi-carrier waveforms are presented, as well as their corresponding signal processing techniques. To evaluate the suitability of the waveforms, key performance metrics concerning power efficiency, transmission performance, and computational complexity are provided. Simulation results are provided to compare and validate the performance of different waveforms, which demonstrate the outstanding performance of Discrete-Fourier-Transform spread Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (DFT-s-OFDM) to THz communications when compared to Cyclic Prefix-OFDM (CP-OFDM) and other single-carrier waveforms.