Channel Analysis and Performance Evaluation of Wireless Backhaul at 5G Frequency Bands

Wireless backhaul (WB) based on the Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) architecture has been attracting increasing interests in the fifth generation (5G) cellular mobile communications and beyond for providing convenient and agile networking. Meanwhile, 5G is extending cellular mobile communication from sub-6 GHz bands to millimeter wave (mmWave) bands for larger under-utilized bandwidth. To efficiently and accurately estimate the performance of wireless backhauling technologies, correct understanding of the backhaul channel is important. However, there still lacks a comprehensive study on the impact of back-hauling channel on the key performance metrics for applications in different deployment scenarios and 5G frequency bands. In this paper, applicable channel models are recommended for the backhaul link and access link in urban environment. Moreover, an in-band WB scheme adopting unified bandwidth allocation is evaluated by the recommended 3GPP channel models for both Random and Hotspot user equipment distributions. It is observed from the numerical results that the frequency and distribution have significant impacts on the performance of the algorithm.