Wireless communication based on microwave photon-level detection with superconducting devices: Achievable rate prediction

• Published in: China communications Vol. 19; no. 12; pp. 27 - 40
• Main Authors: Zhang, Junyu, Gong, Chen, Li, Shangbin, Ni, Rui, Zuo, Chengjie, Zhu, Jinkang, Zhao, Ming, Xu, Zhengyuan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: China Institute of Communications 01.12.2022; Key Laboratory of Wireless-Optical Communications,Chinese Academy of Sciences,School of Information Science and Technology,University of Science and Technology of China,Hefei 230026,China%Huawei Technology,Shenzhen 518129,China
• Subjects: Handury Brown-Twiss (HBT) experiments; Josephson junction; Josephson junctions; Microwave circuits; Microwave communication; Microwave filters; microwave photon detection; Photonics; Signal detection; superconducting absorption barrier; Superconducting microwave devices; Han-dury Brown-Twiss(HBT)experiments; superconducting absorption barrier; Josephson junction; microwave photon detection
• ISSN: 1673-5447
• DOI: 10.23919/JCC.2022.00.017

Future wireless communication system embraces physical-layer signal detection with high sensitivity, especially in the microwave photon level. Currently, the receiver primarily adopts the signal detection based on semi-conductor devices for signal detection, while this paper introduces high-sensitivity photon-level microwave detection based on superconducting structure. We first overview existing works on the photon-level communication in the optical spectrum as well as the microwave photon-level sensing based on superconducting structure in both theoretical and experimental perspectives, including microwave detection circuit model based on Josephson junction, microwave photon counter based on Josephson junction, and two reconstruction approaches under background noise. In addition, we characterize channel modeling based on two different microwave photon detection approaches, including the absorption barrier and the dual-path Handury Brown-Twiss (HBT) experiments, and predict the corresponding achievable rates. According to the performance prediction, it is seen that the microwave photon-level signal detection can increase the receiver sensitivity compared with the state-of-the-art standardized communication system with waveform signal reception, with gain over 10dB.