Backhauling 5G small cells: A radio resource management perspective

Developing efficient backhauling solutions for small cells is considered as one of the most significant challenges in the rollout of the upcoming 5G cellular systems where massive numbers of small cells will be deployed. In this article, we first review small cell evolutions and the consequent radio access network architecture evolution toward heterogeneity and centralized baseband processing. The backhaul solution, which is mainly determined by the availability of existing backhaul infrastructures and service demand, will lead to a heterogeneous backhaul network architecture. Radio resource management issues including cell association, and interference management and scheduling with inter-node coordination, as well as how they are related to backhaul solutions are discussed. Based on the existing RRM solutions and their limitations in multi-tier 5G systems with heterogeneous backhaul network architecture, backhaul- aware RRM strategies are envisioned. Results from a simple case study of joint cell association and bandwidth allocation with a massive MIMO-based in-band wireless backhauling framework are presented to demonstrate the performance gain with backhaul-aware RRM in a multi-tier cellular RAN. Several related open research issues are highlighted, and possible solution approaches are briefly discussed.