Joint User Association and Transmission Scheduling in Integrated mmWave Access and Terahertz Backhaul Networks

Terahertz wireless backhaul is expected to meet the high-speed backhaul requirements of future ultra-dense networks using millimeter-wave (mmWave) base stations (BSs). In order to achieve higher network capacity with limited resources and meet the quality of service (QoS) requirements of more users in the integrated mmWave access and terahertz backhaul network, this article formulates a problem of maximizing the number of users successfully served in both the access and backhaul links. Since the problem is a non-linear integer optimization problem, a minimum rate ratio user association and transmission scheduling algorithm is proposed to obtain a suboptimal solution. The proposed algorithm takes the minimum rate ratio as the user association criterion and schedules first the users with fewer backhaul transmission slots. In addition, the algorithm will update the number of access transmission slots allocated to users and the access scheduling results after the backhaul scheduling phase. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms several benchmark algorithms in terms of the number of served users and system throughput, and it can cope with a large number of bursty user requests.