Opening the THz-Spectrum for Communication in 5G and Beyond

Since the early 1990s our world has been subjected to a fundamental transformation into the so called 'networked society'. Political trends and movements as well as our private everyday lives have become widely determined by the rapid worldwide exchange of information among individuals, cybernetic systems and machines. The continuous data traffic growth together with the demand for anywhere and anytime connectivity, mainly fuelled by the demand for transmission of high definition video, result in a shortage of radio bandwidth which means "transport capacity" in the wireless communication networks. In consequence, and enabled by the impressive progress of semiconductor device technologies, future radio communication systems will utilize frequency bands in the so called "THz-spectrum", which roughly describes the range from ~ 100 GHz up to several 100 GHz. This will provide an abundance of bandwidth and open entirely new perspectives for a nearly unlimited increase of data traffic. However the exploitation of THz spectral resources involves high technical challenges: Propagation properties as well as environmental influences on "THz-wave propagation" will require (and allow for?) new radio system concepts and architectures.