A novel approach for back-haul Self Healing in 4G/5G HetNets

4G/5G Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets), which are expected to have a very dense multi-layer network structure, have emerged as a solution to satisfy the increasing demand for high data rates. These networks, similar to other networks, are subject to failures of communication components, which may occur due to many reasons. Self-Healing (SH) is the ability of the network to continue its normal operation in the presence of failures. The contribution of this paper is to introduce a novel SH approach for all network base-stations (BSs) back-hauling in a HetNet. New SH radios are proposed with enabled Cognitive Radio (CR) capabilities for utilizing the spectrum. A Software Defined Wireless Network Controller (SDWNC) is used to handle all control information between all network elements (except user equipment). This novel pre-planned reactive SH approach ensures network reliability under multiple failures. A simulation study is conducted to assess the performance of our approach through the evaluation of the Degree of Recovery (DoR) under single and multiple failures. Our approach can achieve a DoR of at least 10% using only 1 SHR and an enhanced DoR can be achieved using a greater number of SHRs.