Integrated Access and Backhaul in Fixed Wireless Access Systems

In this work we evaluate the potential of using access-integrated backhaul in a fixed wireless access (FWA) use case. FWA is considered as a potential use case for early 5G deployment. The system is deployed in the 28 GHz band to provide FWA to residential houses in a suburban scenario where the access points (APs) are deployed on utility poles. It is assumed that only a small fraction of the APs has dedicated backhaul transport (e.g. fiber) and the remainder of the APs are instead backhauled wirelessly by using access-integrated backhaul. The access-integrated backhaul shares the radio resources with the FWA and consumes a substantial part of the available resources especially when multi-hop backhaul is considered. The backhaul aggregation points quickly become the bottle necks since they consume a majority of the radio resources. However, when considering the amount of spectrum that is available at 28 GHz then serving at least 25 Mbps in aggregated constant DL/UL traffic to houses seems feasible. This is accomplished by having less than 20% of the APs connected with dedicated backhaul while the rest of the APs are using accessintegrated backhaul.