Tractable Model for Rate in Self-Backhauled Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks

TLDR

Millimeter‑wave cellular systems rely on high‑gain directional antennas and dense base‑station deployments to counteract severe near‑field path loss and poor diffraction, and the resulting interference isolation enables self‑backhauling in a mesh architecture that supports the required high base‑station densities, leading to coverage and rate behaviors distinct from conventional UHF networks. The paper proposes a general, tractable mmWave cellular model that captures these key trends and characterizes the associated rate distribution. The authors develop a tractable mmWave model validated with real urban building data and empirically derived path‑loss models. The analysis shows that, unlike UHF networks, spectral efficiency and cell‑edge rate rise with base‑station density, bandwidth mainly boosts median and peak rates, and appropriate combinations of wired backhaul fraction and base‑station density can maintain a target median rate.

Abstract

Millimeter wave (mmWave) cellular systems will require high-gain directional antennas and dense base station (BS) deployments to overcome a high near-field path loss and poor diffraction. As a desirable side effect, high-gain antennas offer interference isolation, providing an opportunity to incorporate self-backhauling, i.e., BSs backhauling among themselves in a mesh architecture without significant loss in the throughput, to enable the requisite large BS densities. The use of directional antennas and resource sharing between access and backhaul links leads to coverage and rate trends that significantly differ from conventional UHF cellular systems. In this paper, we propose a general and tractable mmWave cellular model capturing these key trends and characterize the associated rate distribution. The developed model and analysis are validated using actual building locations from dense urban settings and empirically derived path loss models. The analysis shows that, in sharp contrast to the interference-limited nature of UHF cellular networks, the spectral efficiency of mmWave networks (besides the total rate) also increases with the BS density, particularly at the cell edge. Increasing the system bandwidth does not significantly influence the cell edge rate, although it boosts the median and peak rates. With self-backhauling, different combinations of the wired backhaul fraction (i.e., the fraction of BSs with a wired connection) and the BS density are shown to guarantee the same median rate (QoS).