The development of IMT for 2030 and beyond is expected to enable new use cases and applications with extremely high data rate and low latency, which will benefit from large contiguous bandwidth spectrum resource with around tens of GHz. This suggests the need to consider spectrum in higher frequency ranges above 92 GHz as a complementary of the lower bands.

Report ITU-R M.[IMT.ABOVE 100 GHz] investigates technical feasibility of IMT in bands above 92 GHz including propagation characteristics, potential new enabling IMT technologies, which could be appropriate for operation in these bands, and relevant deployment scenarios.

The Report describes a series of propagation measurement activities carried out by academia and industry aiming at investigating the propagation characteristics in these bands under several different environments (such as outdoor urban and indoor office). It also includes a summary of the measurement activities collected for these bands, noting that bands of interest are more concentrated in 100, 140-160, 220-240, and around 300 GHz. Characteristics of IMT technologies in bands above 92 GHz, including coverage, link budget, mobility, impact of bandwidth and needed capabilities to support new use cases, have been presented in this Report.

To overcome major challenges of operating in bands above 92 GHz such as limited transmission power, the obstructed propagation environment due to high propagation losses and blockage, it describes enabling antenna and semiconductor technologies, material technologies including reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and MIMO and beamforming technologies as potential solutions.

Given the large bandwidth and high attenuation characteristics of bands above 92 GHz, some typical use cases are also envisaged in this Report, such as indoor/outdoor hot spots, integrated sensing and communication, super-sidelink, flexible wireless backhaul and fronthaul.

The radio wave propagation assessment, measurements, technology development and prototyping described in the Report indicate that utilizing the bands above 92 GHz is feasible for studied IMT deployment scenarios, and could be considered for the development of IMT for 2030 and beyond.

This ITU-R report is expected to be completed and approved in 2023.

References:

ITU-R Report in Progress: Use of IMT (likely 5G and 6G) above 100 GHz (even >800 GHz)