Analysis of Duplexing Patterns in Multi-Hop mmWave Integrated Access and Backhaul Systems

Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) technology promises to facilitate cost-effective deployments of 5G New Radio (NR) systems operating in both sub-6 GHz and millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands. As full-duplex wireless systems are in their infancy, initial deployments of IAB networks may need to rely on half-duplex operation to coordinate transmissions between access and backhaul links. However, the use of half-duplex operation not only makes the scheduling of links in the IAB networks interdependent, but also the number of their feasible combinations grows exponentially with the network size, thereby posing challenges to the efficient design of such systems. In this paper, by accounting for mmWave radio characteristics, we propose a joint resource allocation and link scheduling framework to enhance the user equipment (UE) throughput in multi-hop in-band IAB systems. We keep the problem in the form of linear programming type for the feasibility of the practical applications. We show that the increased number of uplink and downlink transmission time interval (TTI) configurations does not result in improved UE throughput as compared to two-TTI configuration. Further, we demonstrate that in-band IAB systems tend to be backhaul-limited, and the utilization of multi-beam functionality at the IAB-donor alleviates this limitation by doubling the average UE throughput. Finally, we show that the use of proportional-fair allocations allows the average UE throughput to be improved by around 10% as compared to the max-min allocations.