Mesh Architecture for Efficient Integrated Access and Backhaul Networking

Integrated access and backhaul (IAB) networking is envisioned as a key technology to support more flexible and dense deployment of base stations (BSs). However, existing directed acyclic graph (DAG) based IAB networking highly limits the flexibility and efficiency of link scheduling, due to the fixed parent-to-child relation between two adjacent IAB nodes. In this paper, a mesh-architecture based approach is developed to improve the efficiency of IAB networking. The key idea of the mesh architecture is to make the relationship between two adjacent IAB nodes configurable. Based on the mesh architecture, the two-stage scheduling scheme of IAB networks is revised. The typical scenarios where the mesh-architecture based IAB networking outperforms the DAG-based one are analyzed. Simulation results show that the mesh-architecture based IAB networking can effectively improve the throughput by 6.70%40.56% and substantially reduce the delay under various traffic loads, as compared to the DAG-based IAB networking.