Constrained Deployment Optimization in Integrated Access and Backhaul Networks
This work addresses network planning challenges for IAB networks, which are crucial for 5G and beyond, but it is incremental as it builds on existing optimization methods with specific constraints.
The paper tackles the problem of constrained node placement in Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) networks for 5G/6G, proposing millimeter wave blocking-aware optimization approaches that boost coverage considerably under deployment limitations.
Integrated access and backhaul (IAB) is one of the promising techniques for 5G networks and beyond (6G), in which the same node/hardware is used to provide both backhaul and cellular services in a multi-hop fashion. Due to the sensitivity of the backhaul links with high rate/reliability demands, proper network planning is needed to make the IAB network performing appropriately and as good as possible. In this paper, we study the effect of deployment optimization on the coverage of IAB networks. We concentrate on the cases where, due to either geographical or interference management limitations, unconstrained IAB node placement is not feasible in some areas. To that end, we propose various millimeter wave (mmWave) blocking-aware constrained deployment optimization approaches. Our results indicate that, even with limitations on deployment optimization, network planning boosts the coverage of IAB networks considerably.