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

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 $\mathcal{O}(N_p+N)$ complexity. We characterize the polynomial approximation error under WPN and derive the Cramér--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.