Relay Selection and Scheduling for Millimeter Wave Backhaul in Urban Environments

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is a key enabling technology for 5G cellular systems. However, due to mmWave propagation characteristics, link length for very high rates is limited and will likely necessitate the use of relay nodes for longer-range ultra-high-speed backhaul communications. This paper investigates relay selection and scheduling to support high end-to-end throughput in mmWave relay-assisted backhaul networks in urban environments. A major challenge in urban environments is the presence of large obstacles (buildings) that block long line-of-sight paths, which arenecessary for very high capacity mmWave links. Using a 3D model for buildings targeted at urban environments, we provide optimal and efficient algorithms both for scheduling communications along a single mmWave relay-assisted path and for choosing the relay-assisted path with maximum throughput among all candidate paths connecting a given base station pair. In addition to proving optimality of these algorithms, we evaluate their performance through simulations based on a real urban topology. Simulation results show that our algorithms can produce short relay paths with end-to-end throughputs of around 10 Gbps and higher that are capable of providing virtual mmWave links for a wireless backhaul use case. Our algorithms improve throughput from 23% to 49% over a range of settings, as compared to average relay paths, and throughput can be more than doubled compared to some relay path choices with similar numbers of relays.