MAC-oriented programmable terahertz PHY via graphene-based Yagi-Uda antennas

Abstract

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Graphene is enabling a plethora of applications in a wide range of fields due to its unique electrical, mechanical, and optical properties. In the realm of wireless communications, graphene shows great promise for the implementation of miniaturized and tunable antennas in the terahertz band. These unique advantages open the door to new reconfigurable antenna structures which, in turn, enable novel communication protocols at different levels of the stack. This paper explores both aspects by, first, presenting a terahertz Yagi-Uda-like antenna concept that achieves reconfiguration both in frequency and beam direction simultaneously. Then, a programmable antenna controller design is proposed to expose the reconfigurability to the PHY and MAC layers, and several examples of its applicability are given. The performance and cost of the proposed scheme is evaluated through full-wave simulations and comparative analysis, demonstrating reconfigurability at nanosecond granularity with overheads below 0.02 mm2and 0.2 mW.Peer Reviewe