Weather Robustness of THz Communications Exemplified with Emulated Dust Clouds

We describe impact of airborne particles (dust) on a THz communication link by measuring its performance degradations. To demonstrate advantages of THz communications under certain weather conditions we launch THz and IR signals at the same time through the same volume of emulated dust clouds and record simultaneously and analyze both received signals. The THz signal consists of a 2.5 Gb/s data modulated on a carrier at 625 GHz. The IR signal with same data runs at 1.5 &μm wavelength. Both are on-off keying formats. Aside from attenuation effects and bit error rate degradations we analyze scintillations that are caused by inhomogeneous and temporal varying particle concentrations. Simulations of THz attenuation for different dust concentrations agree reasonably with measured results.