Cooperative spectrum sharing in 5G access and backhaul networks

Stringent demands for a continuous evolution of cellular networks push today academic and industrial researchers to re-think backhaul solutions for 5G. In one hand, wireless backhaul solutions are cost effective and easy to deploy but suffer from limited capacity. On the other hand, wired solutions have the potential to meet bandwidth requirements but usually involve higher costs. Thus, adoption of heterogeneous technologies will be necessary. Moreover, in 5G, access and backhaul networks will work closely, and therefore, total separation of their resources may not be possible anymore; rather, cooperation between the two portions of the cellular network is desirable. Subsequently, cooperative access-backhaul mechanisms become necessary to ensure the best use of the scarce resources, i.e. bandwidth. Hence, in this paper we present the idea of spectrum sharing among different links from a cooperative access-backhaul mechanism point of view. We present simulation results for different approaches of such sharing from a common spectrum pool. The results show that traffic-aware approaches show increased fairness thus reinforcing the idea of cooperative access-backhaul mechanisms as essential strategies in current and future networks.