Tractable Model for Rate in Self-Backhauled Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks

Millimeter wave (mmW) cellular systems will require high gain directional antennas and dense base station (BS) deployments to overcome high near field path loss and poor diffraction. As a desirable side effect, high gain antennas provide interference isolation, providing an opportunity to incorporate self-backhauling--BSs backhauling among themselves in a mesh architecture without significant loss in throughput--to enable the requisite large BS densities. The use of directional antennas and resource sharing between access and backhaul links leads to coverage and rate trends that differ significantly from conventional microwave ($mu$W) cellular systems. In this paper, we propose a general and tractable mmW cellular model capturing these key trends and characterize the associated rate distribution. The developed model and analysis is validated using actual building locations from dense urban settings and empirically-derived path loss models. The analysis shows that in sharp contrast to the interference limited nature of $mu$W cellular networks, the spectral efficiency of mmW networks (besides total rate) also increases with BS density particularly at the cell edge. Increasing the system bandwidth, although boosting median and peak rates, does not significantly influence the cell edge rate. With self-backhauling, different combinations of the wired backhaul fraction (i.e. the faction of BSs with a wired connection) and BS density are shown to guarantee the same median rate (QoS).