Integrated access and backhaul (IAB) in 5G
Published:
In our latest paper, we have provided a comprehensive analysis of IAB (as well as orthogonal access and backhaul, OAB) in mm-wave 5G networks. Our results concretely demonstrate that the gains from densification of small cells in an IAB setting quickly saturate because of the bottleneck on the rate of wireless backhaul links. In addition, load balancing does not provide significant gains in this setting since the anchor macro cells will ultimately have to serve all the users in their coverage either through access links or via backhaul links to small cells regardless of how many of them were offloaded to small cells.