Title:  Relay-Assisted Topologies for Hybrid Fiber/mmWave-Wireless Backhaul

Committee: 

Dr. Blough, Advisor      

Dr. Sivakumar, Chair

Dr. Chang

Abstract:

The objective of the proposed research is optimize the hybrid fiber-wireless backhaul networks in urban environments for the 5G communication system. With the dense deployment of small-cell base stations in the 5G backhaul network, the crucial challenge for mobile backhaul is to provide efficiency and reliable data transmission between different base stations and the core network. Millimeter wave(mmWave) communication becomes a promising technique to this challenge with its enormous amount of spectrum and multi-Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) data rates. However, the poor propagation characteristics and severe blockage effect of mmWave signals must be considered and overcome within the design and optimization of backhaul network. To both extend the range of communications and to deal with obstacles, the use of relays for mmWave communications has been proposed. With the deployment of relays in backhaul networks, multi-hop relay paths with multi-Gbps data rates will be selected between BSs, where the source and destination BSs cannot communicate with each other directly with Line-of-sight(LoS) path. For the preliminary work, we have presented different path selection algorithms to find a single optimal-throughput path using different relay strategies and find a high-throughput path with far fewer relays. Upon the preliminary work, we will investigate the multi-path selection problem instead of the single path between BSs to improve the throughput performance. Then, topologies are analyzed and designed in our hybrid fiber-wireless backhaul network to satisfy the data rate requirement for each small-cell base stations with different data traffic load.