Heterogenous Public Safety Wireless Networks with mmWave Small Cells: An IAB-based Approach

An efficient public safety communication network seeks minimal response time, optimal coordination between the disaster site and rescue team, with adequate situational awareness. Such a network requires an enduring and reliable architecture. This paper proposes an architecture for supporting emergency communications using an integrated access backhaul (IAB) in the heterogenous networks (HetNets). The macro base station (MBS) is connected to the wired backhaul, while the small cell base stations (SBSs) are wirelessly connected to the MBS using the IAB. The MBS is the IAB donor, while SBSs are the IAB nodes. As the IAB provides an economically viable solution for dense deployment in the wireless communication networks (WCNs), its use in public warning systems will serve as a robust solution during emergencies. Broadcasting the essential information with a wireless backhaul will involve the multi-hop networks to support minimum throughput requirements of the users within the respective small cell. A major benefit of using IAB is the spectral and infrastructure resource reuse for backhaul as well as the access network. An optimal split is essential for the available bandwidth, between the backhaul and access networks, for adequate system performance. Despite IAB being an attractive scheme, its implementation involves certain research challenges which have been stated in this paper.