Post-doc: Channel and impairments model in THz communications - at IMT Nord Europe

Public establishment belonging to IMT (Institut Mines-Télécom), placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, IMT Nord Europe has three main objectives: providing our students with ethically responsible engineering practice enabling them to solve 21st century issues, carrying out our R&D activities leading to outstanding innovations and supporting territorial development through innovation and entrepreneurship. Ideally positioned at the heart of Europe, 1 hour away from Paris, 30 min from Brussels and 1h30 from London, IMT Nord Europe has strong ambitions to become a main actor of the current industrial transitions, digital and environmental, by combining education and research on engineering and digital technologies.
Located on two main campuses dedicated to research and education in Douai and Lille, IMT Nord Europe offers research facilities of almost 20,000m² in the following areas:
- Digital science,
- Energy and Environment,
- Materials and Processes.
For more details, visit the School’s website: www.imt-nord-europe.fr
The position is vacant within the CERI SN, ARTS (Autonomous and Resilient System axis) axis. ARTS focuses on designing distributed and communicating systems, from IoT to fleets of robots (land and aquatic). These systems address key challenges for a sustainable industry and environmental monitoring by collecting on-site data. ARTS enhances these systems' security, resilience, and autonomy across multiple layers: from physical communication and signal processing to resource-efficient software architectures. Their work ensures interoperability, scalability, and context adaptability while addressing networking issues. This approach lays the groundwork for the distributed systems of tomorrow.

Sub-Terahertz (THz)-band (0.1-1 THz) communication is envisioned as a key wireless technology of the next decade. The sub-THz band will help overcome the spectrum scarcity problems and capacity limitations of current wireless networks, by providing an unprecedentedly large bandwidth which can enable applications including Terabit-per second backhaul systems, ultra-high-definition content streaming among mobile devices and wireless high-bandwidth secure communications.
Many open challenges need to be addressed. It is well known that the adverse channel conditions at sub-THz frequencies (strong obstruction losses) restrict the communication to line-of-sight (LoS) or slightly obstructed LoS situations. Such limitations can be compensated by means of using a large number of antennas, which results in large array gains. However, traditional techniques cannot be directly transposed to sub-THz bands as they do not consider the specific radio-frequency (RF) impairments of sub-THz.

This work will investigate statistical channel models (see for example [1, 2]) for sub-THz communication. Two paths can then be explored:
• environment sensing (see [3]): in an integrated Sensing and Communication scenario, a target and a scatterer cannot be modelled in the same way.
• channel prediction: guessing how the channel will evolve is also key in order to adapt beams and track the destination (see [4]).
The work will be possibly supported by experiments in the framework of the PEPR-NF project (see [5] for an example of demonstrators).

Objectives:
• Investigate the state-of-the-art of channel models and impairments for sub-THz communication.
• Either explore the ISAC channel model or the channel prediction, for instance using machine learning.
• Collaborate to measurement campaigns to validate the proposed models.
[1] S. Ju and T. S. Rappaport, "Statistical Channel Model of Wideband Sub-THz Radio Propagation in Indoor Factories at 142 GHz: Towards 6G Industrial Wireless Networks," in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 14 August 2024
[2] Zhang, M. F. Bengtson, P. Kyösti, J. Kyröläinen and W. Fan, "Dynamic Sub-THZ Radio Channel Emulation: Principle, Challenges, and Experimental Validation," in IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 10-16, February 2024
[3] E. Güven and G. Karabulut-Kurt, "On the Mutuality Between Localization and Channel Modeling in Sub-THz," in IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 26-32, February 2024
[4] A. E. Kalør, O. Simeone and P. Popovski, "Prediction of mmWave/THz Link Blockages Through Meta-Learning and Recurrent Neural Networks," in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, vol. 10, no. 12, pp. 2815-2819, Dec. 2021
[5] T. Kürner et al., "THz Communications and the Demonstration in the ThoR–Backhaul Link," in IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 554-567, Sept. 2024