Mobile Backhaul in Release 8 and Beyond: Benefits, Challenges, Market Status and Impact Analysis

The significantly increasing mobile capacity demand, the use of advanced techniques like enhanced multiple input multiple output to boost throughput, very high data rate, reliability, very low latency, long battery life, mobility, and to enable internet of things in 4G and 5G technologies, aggravate extreme backhaul requirements with respect to capacity, latency, availability, energy, and on the top of this, cost efficiency. However, it is challenging to get a complete one backhaul technology that can solve all problems of backhaul especially massive introduction of small cells in mind. To overcome various backhaul problems there are many backhaul solutions i.e. the use of diversified backhaul under different use cases provides cost efficient backhaul solution. This paper presents benefits, implementation challenges, and use cases of mobile backhaul in release 8 and beyond. It also presents coverage and capacity analysis using excel based dimensioning tool for a given sample area. Lastly the paper shows economic benefits of diversified backhaul for small and macro cells and high-level implementation strategy for the considered area.