Autonomous self-backhauled LTE mesh network with QoS guarantee

Public safety communication systems are currently evolving due to emergence of LTE as a mature solution to replace the legacy ones while providing new services. However, LTE is initially designed for commercial cellular network and needs to be furthermore evolved to tackle the substantial requirements of public safety use cases. For instance, opportunistic deployments require modifications to enable the autonomous operation and meshing of moving base stations while satisfying heterogeneous frequency band availability. In this article, we present a novel radio access network infrastructure architecture that enables multi-hop LTE mesh networking for nomadic and autonomous base stations via in-band self-backhauling. Furthermore, we investigate the coordination and orchestration functionality within the proposed architecture and propose a hierarchical resource scheduling algorithm in order to efficiently meet QoS requirements for real-time traffic while maximizing the throughput for elastic flows. To demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of our proposed architecture, we implement the corresponding self-backhauling air-interface based on OpenAirInterface (OAI) platform and compare it with the legacy LTE air-interface. Finally, we evaluate the efficiency and adaptability of our proposed resource scheduling algorithm in various network topology and heterogeneous traffic flows with QoS requirements.