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

THz transmissions suffer from pointing errors due to antenna misalignment and incur higher path loss because of molecular absorption at such a high frequency. In this paper, we employ an amplify-and-forward (AF) dual-hop relay to mitigate the effect of pointing errors and extend the range of a wireless backhaul network. 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 model and statistical pointing errors. Using computer simulations, we validate the derived analysis of the relay-assisted system. We 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.