Dynamic Routing and Load Balancing Techniques for Integrated Access and Backhaul Network

Abstract: Mobile networks have rapidly evolved over decades, and have arrived at the fifth generation (5G) system in recent years. From 2019, companies started to bring 5G networks into business, providing higher data rates, lower latency, and larger network capacity to the world. One of the main advancements in 5G network systems is the use of millimetre waves for wireless transmission. This not only grants higher throughput with wide bandwidth but also introduces new challenges to the radio access networks in 5G systems. To tackle the challenges, a new type of network, which is called the Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) network, has been proposed as a deployment solution for 5G cellular networks. In this work, we investigate the routing mechanism of an IAB network and propose a novel load balancing algorithm that can be applied to the IAB network for improvement in throughput as well as load distribution. We extend the work from previous studies on IAB networks and evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in comparison to previous work. Through radio network simulations, we find that the shortest path routing outperforms a greedy algorithm in terms of path selection in the network and that the proposed algorithm achieves load balancing among the network, combined with an improvement in the user throughput. Finally, we conclude our work and suggest directions for future work in the study of IAB networks.