1-bit DSM-Encoded High-Order QAM Over a 4.6-km D-Band Wireless Link

1-bit DSM-Encoded High-Order QAM Over a 4.6-km D-Band Wireless Link

Abstract

We report an experimental realization of a photonic-aided millimeter-wave (MMW) wireless system in the D-band (~130 GHz), utilizing 1-bit delta-sigma modulation (DSM) to deliver high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals across a 4.6 km line-of-sight (LoS) link. A low-pass DSM [order 4, oversampling ratio (OSR) 8] encodes baseband high-order QAM into an oversampled 1-bit waveform, achieving a net payload rate of 18.75 Gbit/s. The approach mitigates nonlinear distortion, especially power amplifier (PA) saturation, without relying on nonlinear digital signal processing (DSP). This is the first D-band wireless transmission of 512-QAM and 1024-QAM over a multikilometer distance enabled by 1-bit quantization, offering a reduced-resolution RF front-end for long-range, high-capacity terahertz (THz) communication.

DOI: 10.1109/LMWT.2025.3632472 IEEEXplore:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11251367