Boosting 5G mm-Wave IAB Reliability with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) can enhance the reliability of 5G mm-Wave networks with IAB by improving blockage resistance and reducing deployment costs through optimized planning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mm-Wave planning tool and demonstrates how RIS integration improves blockage resilience and cost-efficiency in dense 5G RAN deployments.

Findings

RIS significantly increases blockage resistance

RIS reduces overall network planning costs

Optimized deployment strategies improve network resilience

Abstract

The introduction of the mm-Wave spectrum into 5G NR promises to bring about unprecedented data throughput to future mobile wireless networks but comes with several challenges. Network densification has been proposed as a viable solution to increase RAN resilience, and the newly introduced Integrated-Access-and-Backhaul (IAB) is considered a key enabling technology with compelling cost-reducing opportunities for such dense deployments. Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have recently gained extreme popularity as they can create Smart Radio Environments by EM wave manipulation and behave as inexpensive passive relays. However, it is not yet clear what role this technology can play in a large RAN deployment. With the scope of filling this gap, we study the blockage resilience of realistic mm-Wave RAN deployments that use IAB and RIS. The RAN layouts have been optimised by means of a novel mm-Wave planning tool based on MILP formulation. Numerical results show how adding RISs to IAB deployments can provide high blockage resistance levels while significantly reducing the overall network planning cost.