Efficient Design Techniques for Reliable Wireless Backhaul Networks

The issues of network performance and reliability in wireless access networks have become indispensable due to the increasing needs for communication services anywhere and anytime. Traditional design of wireless backhaul networks has a simple tree-like structure which is vulnerable to network failures. To protect services against network component/facility breakdown, reliable network design is required. However, the complexity of reliable network design is a well-known problem. Various techniques have been proposed to find a minimum-cost solution in a reliable network design. In this paper, we propose and compare two different approaches which are network link restoration and network path restoration for reliable wireless backhaul network design. These restoration techniques provide fault tolerance to tree topology in traditional cellular network design, so that any breakdown of single link or multiple links within a network path can no longer interrupt the network services. As a result, the network design with backup path using restoration approaches can greatly enhance the network reliability and quality of services. We also show that a well-known shortest path algorithm can be efficiently applied as a meta-heuristic technique for both link restoration and path restoration approaches in a reliable wireless backhaul network design.