Radio Resource Management Considerations for 5G Millimeter Wave Backhaul and Access Networks

Millimeter wave (mm-Wave) frequencies between 6 and 100 GHz provide orders of magnitude larger spectrum than current cellular allocations and allow usage of large numbers of antennas for exploiting beamforming and spatial multiplexing gains. In this paper, we elaborate the main design concepts when integrating mm-Wave radio access networks (RANs) into the fifth generation (5G) system, considering aspects like spectrum, architecture, and backhauling/fronthauling. The corresponding radio resource management (RRM) challenges, extended RRM functionalities for 5G mm-Wave RAN, and RRM splits, are addressed, as well. Finally, based on the previous discussions, a framework is proposed which allows joint backhaul and access operation for 5G mm-Wave RAN, which we envisage as one of the key innovative technologies in 5G. The proposed framework consists of a joint scheduling and resource allocation algorithm to improve resource utilization efficiency with low computational complexity and to fully exploit spatial multiplexing gain for fulfilling user demands.(c) 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works