Performance Analysis on Cache-Enabled FR2 IAB Networks

This paper brings the concept of wireless edge caching (WEC) to the realm of integrated access and backhaul (IAB) networks. Traditionally, both access and backhaul are allocated fixed spectrum. However, when WEC is applied to the IAB nodes to pre-fetch some popular files, the backhaul traffic can be drastically reduced. Accordingly, an analytical framework is developed for a cache-enabled IAB network for the wide-band frequency range 2 (FR2) (> 24.25 GHz) channel model. In particular, the optimal spectrum resource allocation policy between access and backhaul for IAB networks is investigated by utilizing WEC. For the considered WEC enabled IAB network, a mathematical framework is presented under the content delivery phase for the calculation of three key performance metrics, namely the average success probability (ASP), throughput, and latency of file delivery with respect to various network parameters such as different caching placement strategies, node density, cache size, antenna number, blockage density, and resource partitioning factor. Extensive numerical results are provided to both verify the theoretical derivations and to demonstrate the precedency of using WEC as a cost-effective measure for the improvement of the IAB network's performance. In particular, under a normalized cache size of 0.6, compared to the baseline no caching scenario, the percentages of backhaul spectrum that can be saved are 48% (26%), 66% (48%), and 47% (27%) when caching the most popular files (caching uniformly) with respect to the ASP, latency, and throughput of file delivery, respectively. The saved backhaul spectrum can then be shifted to the access for its performance enhancements. Our findings also show that there exists an optimal spectrum partition for IAB with respect to different network parameter settings. Further, there exists a tradeoff in the selection of the optimal partitioning factor with respect to ASP/ throughput and latency of file delivery for varying IAB node densities.