A recently published paper explores the influence of atmospheric dust, including dust storms, on wireless communication links in the THz band.

Walton Institute Adjunct Professor, now at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Sasitharan Balasubramaniam and Walton Institute PhD Researcher Thakshila Wedage, along with South East Technological University’s Bernard Butler, Tampere University of Technology’s Yevgeni Koucheryavy, and University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Mehmet C. Vuran, recently co-authored the paper “Comparative Analysis of Terahertz Propagation Under Dust Storm Conditions on Mars and Earth: which was published in the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing.

The paper explores the influence of atmospheric dust, including dust storms, on wireless communication links in the THz band. 6G deployment will include THz communications because it offers higher capacity. The paper’s researchers developed a channel model that considers the signal attenuation caused by atmospheric dust, and compared THz communications performance on Earth and Mars under typical conditions for each planet.

Walton Institute PhD Student Thakshila Wedage says, “People who live in dusty areas face challenges when it comes to staying connected, and this will be even more important for future settlers on Mars, which has frequent dust storms. The upcoming 6G wireless communication technology offers the potential for communication speeds that are a hundred times faster than what we have now. However, 6G will use much higher frequencies that are more subject to signal losses, such as losses caused by signal absorption by tiny dust particles, thereby seriously limiting communication performance during dust storms.”

Understanding how 6G wireless signals might be affected by dust particles in both Earth and Mars environments is crucial for designing communication systems that work reliably outdoors, even in harsh conditions. This research will be valuable in planning communication networks on both Earth and Mars, ensuring they can handle the increasing amount of high-frequency wireless data while taking account of the challenges posed by periodically dusty environments.

Link to publication https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10149404

DOI: 10.1109/JSTSP.2023.3285450

The work was supported in part by the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Department of Agriculture, Food, and Marine on behalf of the Government of Ireland-Vistamilk under Grant 16/RC/3835, in part by YL Verkot, Finland, and in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant ECCS-2030272.

For more information contact:

Dr. Bernard Butler – bernard.butler@wit.ie

Mr. Thakshila Wedage – thakshila.wedage@waltoninstitute.ie