Enabling Integrated Access and Backhaul in Dynamic Aerial-Terrestrial Networks for Coverage Enhancement

Aerial base stations (ABSs) flying in the air inject wireless networks more flexibility and agility beyond ground base stations (GBSs) to respond to spatio-temporal coverage demand. To fully unlock the potential of ABSs, a high-capacity, flexible and dynamic wireless backhaul provision is necessitated and integrated access and backhaul (IAB) architecture comes into the picture. In this paper, we investigate the availability of IAB architecture in dynamic aerial-terrestrial networks in terms of coverage probability (CP) and further explore the feasible region of IAB to promote aerial-terrestrial coverage enhancement. Specifically, the results show that the capability of IAB to promote aerial-terrestrial coverage enhancement would be diminished with the increases of ABSs flight speed and GBS density. The reason is found that relying on fixed GBSs to provide dynamic backhaul for flying ABSs would come with frequent handovers, which degrades network CP. On this account, to make IAB adapt to dynamic aerial-terrestrial networks, a mobility-adaptable IAB scheme is proposed where a distance threshold
L_p
is set to alleviate the negative effect caused by handovers. With
L_p
optimized, the coverage performance of dynamic aerial-terrestrial IAB network is shown to be increased, especially in dense GBS regime.