Analysis of Massive MIMO-Enabled Downlink Wireless Backhauling for Full-Duplex Small Cells

TL;DR

This paper develops a stochastic geometry-based framework to analyze the downlink rate coverage in massive MIMO-enabled small cell networks with in-band and out-of-band wireless backhauls, addressing interference and channel effects.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible analytical model capturing interference and channel heterogeneity, deriving closed-form coverage probabilities and optimizing in-band/out-of-band small cell proportions.

Findings

In-band wireless backhauling can be beneficial under certain conditions.

Maintaining an optimal ratio of in-band and out-of-band small cells improves network performance.

Proposed remedial solutions can mitigate backhaul interference effectively.

Abstract

Using tools from stochastic geometry, we develop a framework to model the downlink rate coverage probability of a user in a given small cell network (SCN) with massive MIMO-enabled wireless backhauls. The considered SCN is composed of a mixture of small cells that are configured in either in-band or out-of-band backhaul modes with a certain probability. The performance of the user in the considered hierarchical network is limited by several sources of interference such as the backhaul interference, small cell base station (SBS)-to-SBS interference and the SI. Moreover, due to the channel hardening effect in massive MIMO, the backhaul links experience long term channel effects only, whereas the access links experience both the long term and short term channel effects. Consequently, the developed framework is flexible to characterize different sources of interference while capturing the heterogeneity of the access and backhaul channels. In specific scenarios, the framework enables deriving closed-form coverage probability expressions. Under perfect backhaul coverage, the simplified expressions are utilized to optimize the proportion of in-band and out-of-band small cells in the SCN in closed-form. Finally, few remedial solutions are proposed that can potentially mitigate the backhaul interference and in turn improve the performance of in-band FD wireless backhauling. Numerical results investigate the scenarios in which in-band wireless backhauling is useful and demonstrate that maintaining a correct proportion of in-band and out-of-band FD small cells is crucial in wireless backhauled SCNs.