On Efficient Wireless Backhaul Planning for the “Frugal 5G” Network

The technology advances in 5G are urban in nature and have a larger focus on high data rates, very low latency, and very high-speed mobility. Amidst this, the issues such as coverage and affordability are likely to persist which will widen the rural-urban divide even further. The connectivity needs of rural areas call for an affordable broadband network which can be accomplished if we design a low mobility energy-efficient network. We refer to such a network as the Frugal 5G network. Deployment of Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) Access Points (APs) is a cost-effective method to provide high-speed low mobility coverage to rural areas. Backhauling the WLAN APs is a challenging task as fiber backhaul is generally unavailable in rural areas. We suggest a method to design the wireless backhaul network in order to serve the WLAN APs. The design objective is to maximize system performance with respect to network throughput and delay while reducing infrastructure utilization. We propose a backhaul design method based on Simulated Annealing (SA) to achieve our objective. Our analysis shows that the proposed algorithm enhances the backhaul network throughput by 24% while minimizing the infrastructure used.