QoS guarantee in self-backhauled LTE mesh networks

LTE is deployed in most countries and continuously evolving to match new use cases as well as requirements. While it is expected to evolve toward 5G deployments for outdoor and long range communications, it will also be used for Public Safety services in major countries. Among that, new scenarios call for wider networks relying on dynamic meshing of base stations. Leveraging the LTE air interface for base station meshing is an appealing idea but is not straightforward to guarantee quality of service (QoS). In this article, we study and evaluate scheduling strategies for multi-hop LTE mesh networks relying on the LTE relay channel. We firstly present the LTE relay channel and the scheduling problem for in-band LTE self-backhauling. We then propose a practical cross-layer method in order to fulfill the QoS requirements of real-time flows in such network. We finally evaluate the proposed method through extensive simulations. We show the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to a legacy method in terms of both QoS requirement satisfaction of real-time flows and throughput enhancement of elastic flows.