Self-backhauling is a general concept where a macro base station provides backhaul to Small base station (or cells) via the existing macro RAN (MRAN). I was just wondering the capacity issues if this technology is deployed in typical dense urban scenarios where the macro RAN will self-backhauled let say 20 or above small cells. What do you think is the simplest approach of increasing the capacity of the MRAN?
Doesn't it come down to bandwidth, measured in the space-frequency domain, that is you can have more than one signal in some given spectrum if the signals can be spatially separated sufficiently that there is no significant interference. Assuming the micro and small stations are fixed you could do this with directional antennae of some sort. If the micro station is expected to move that will be a lot harder!
Thank you Tony. But the MRAN will need to operate on high frequencies such as mmWave? Then there may be need for resign of the physical layer and hardware as LTE physical-layer numerology was originally designed to operate with a carrier frequency of around 2GHz.
First, I don't think the goal of LTE advanced relay is to increase capacity of the macrocell so much, but rather to improve reception in poor reception parts of the macro cell area. Or, also, to extend the coverage of the macrocell a little.
Of course, improving reception means you can offer better bit rates on average to the UE, so I suppose you can say that increases capacity.
But to answer your question more directly, it is possible to use a different frequency channel for the backhaul function. These are called "outband relay nodes." In this case, the microcell-UE frequency band is different from the relay frequency band, which should give you that much more capacity.
I don't think the base frequency that LTE was designed for is important. As you go higher in frequency you get more and more directionality and more and more susceptibility to shading by obscuring objects. In the end you will need line of sight between the two stations, especially if you are going to 30+ GHz frequencies. But the available bandwidth both in terms of frequency, and spatially, is very attractive.
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