English

Continuous Intra-Symbol Phase Noise Tracking for THz OFDM via Polynomial Reconstruction

Signal Processing 2026-07-24 v1

Abstract

Terahertz (THz) communication systems for sixth-generation (6G) networks are severely impaired by Wiener phase noise (WPN), whose innovation variance at sub-THz carriers is substantially larger than in millimeter-wave 5G systems. Conventional common-phase-error (CPE) compensation applies a single phase rotation per OFDM symbol and becomes inadequate when the phase trajectory varies significantly within the symbol duration. This letter proposes continuous phase trajectory reconstruction (CPTR), a closed-form intra-symbol phase noise tracking method that reconstructs the sample-level phase trajectory from pilot observations via least-squares polynomial fitting with O(Np+N)\mathcal{O}(N_p+N) complexity. We characterize the polynomial approximation error under WPN and derive the Cram\'{e}r--Rao bound (CRB) for polynomial phase coefficient estimation, showing that CPTR is minimum-variance unbiased within the polynomial surrogate model. Simulations at 300~GHz with \textit{N}~=~1024 and 16-QAM show that CPTR remains within 0.2~dB of the CRB across SNR~=~10--45~dB while achieving significantly lower complexity than Kalman-based tracking and substantial BER gains over CPE, linear interpolation, and cubic spline methods.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.22111,
  title  = {Continuous Intra-Symbol Phase Noise Tracking for THz OFDM via Polynomial Reconstruction},
  author = {Sawatsakorn Chaiyasoonthorn and Ura Klongklaew and Phichai Youplao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.22111},
  year   = {2026}
}