Scheduling Conflicts in Wireless In-Band Backhaul for 5G Millimeter Wave Communications

Millimeter wave communications play a key role in the next generation of cellular networks. The excess of bandwidth available at E-band frequencies plus the ultra-dense deployment of 5G millimeter wave basestations provide tremendous capacity to the 5G mobile network. In order to speed up the real deployment of millimeter wave basestations especially in dense urban scenarios, an inexpensive wireless connection between the access points and to the core network is inevitable. In this 5G demo we will address the impact of in-band wireless backhaul for 5G millimeter wave communications in a typical urban scenario in Chicago. Since the millimeter-wave radio modules are half duplex the in-band wirless backhaul can create scheduling conflicts in case the backhaul links and access links to the mobile users are competing against each other for radio resources. In this demo we will analyze the scheduling conflicts caused by the half duplex millimeter wave basestations with integrated backhaul that can lead to starvation situations for mobile users. Specific solutions that resolve these types of scheduling conflicts are demonstrated and prove that in-band wireless backhaul is a very cost-efficient method to realize millimeter wave communications for 5G cellular.