Robotic Aerial 6G Small Cells with Grasping End Effectors for mmWave Relay Backhauling
This addresses the need for flexible and cost-efficient network densification in beyond 5G and 6G wireless systems, though it is incremental as it builds on existing RASC concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of optimizing wireless backhaul links in dense urban networks by deploying Robotic Aerial Small Cells (RASCs) with grasping capabilities as relay nodes, showing that RASCs require 25% to 65% fewer units than fixed small cells to achieve the same throughput.
Deployment of small cells in dense urban areas dedicated to the heterogeneous network (HetNet) and associated relay nodes for improving backhauling is expected to be an important structural element in the design of beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G wireless access networks. A key operational aspect in HetNets is how to optimally implement the wireless backhaul links to efficiently support the traffic demand. In this work, we utilize the recently proposed Robotic Aerial Small Cells (RASCs) that are able to grasp at different tall urban landforms as wireless relay nodes for backhauling. This can be considered as an alternative to fixed small cells (FSCs) which lack flexibility since once installed their position cannot be altered. More specifically, on-demand deployment of RASCs is considered for constructing a millimeter-wave (mmWave) backhaul network to optimize available network capacity using a network flow-based mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation. Numerical investigations reveal that for the same required achievable throughput, the number of RASCs required are 25\% to 65\% less than the number of required FSCs. This result can have significant implications in reducing required wireless network equipment (capex) to provide a given network capacity and allows for an efficient and flexible network densification.