Field Trial on Millimeter Wave Integrated Access and Backhaul

Higher bandwidth and spatial reuse through densification of wireless cells are necessary to meet the increase of wireless traffic demand in the next decade. Millimeter wave network can fulfill both of these criteria with the availability of abundant bandwidth and higher spatial reuse through directional beamforming. However, millimeter wave network suffers from coverage hole in urban environment due to blockage because of high path loss for millimeter wave signals. Wireless backhaul allows densification of mobile networks without incurring additional fiber deployment cost. Millimeter wave band based Integrated access and backhaul (IAB) is expected to provide a low cost coverage enhancement and capacity improvement solution. This paper focuses on the system performance of IAB node deployment in terms of coverage and user throughput by field experiment using millimeter wave band. The trial results prove that coverage ratio is significant improved with deploying IAB node. Meanwhile, dynamic resource allocation, including dynamic time division multiplexing (TDM) and dynamic TDM with flexible space division multiplexing (SDM) between access and backhaul link, brings obvious user throughput gain due to better resource utilization and providing more access transmission opportunities for User Equipment (UE) in backhaul slot.