Overview:

With the emergence of applications such as virtual reality and augmented reality, current mobile communication network is increasingly unable to meet people's needs. Thus, network densification has become an important means to increase network capacity. To densely deploy small base stations at sites such as street light poles and shelters, it is necessary to find a low-cost, quick-to-deploy, and easy-to-use backhaul solution. To this end, wireless mesh networks have become a competitive networking solution, due to their self-configuration, self-optimization, and fault self-healing properties. Furthermore, to improve the utilization of spectrum resources and network reliability, as well as providing fine-grained QoS management and service-based multi-path routing, it is indispensable to study integrated access and backhaul technologies.

Study on IAB can be integrated with mmWave communication technologies. At the physical layer, research problems include multi-dimensional resource allocation, beam management, interference management, and fast link failure detection. At the MAC layer, mechanisms need to be developed for mobility management, scheduling, layer-2 routing and fast fault link recovery. To exploit the flexibility brought by IAB, research problems like network economics can be studied for UPN networks, and the prospects are very broad.

People: Aimin Tang，Bangzhao Zhai，Mengxin Yu，Cheng Huang，and Chao Xu