Joint Robotic Aerial Base Station Deployment and Wireless Backhauling in 6G Multi-hop Networks

TL;DR

The paper addresses backhaul bottlenecks in dense mmWave 6G networks by proposing robotic aerial base stations (RABS) anchored to urban lampposts and ensuring concurrent wireless backhaul and access. It develops a joint deployment, RB allocation, and flow-routing optimization within a multi-hop IAB mmWave framework, solved via a greedy algorithm that constructs a feasible path set and LP-based resource allocation. Numerical results show substantial improvements, including up to 65% more served traffic than fixed small cells under realistic RB budgets and hop constraints, and robustness to spatial-temporal traffic variation modeled by a lognormal distribution. The approach offers a scalable, energy-efficient, flexible deployment paradigm for future green, dense 6G networks.

Abstract

Due to their ability to anchor into tall urban landforms, such as lampposts or street lights, robotic aerial base stations (RABSs) can create a hyper-flexible wireless multi-hop heterogeneous network to meet the forthcoming green, densified, and dynamic network deployment to support, inter alia, high data rates. In this work, we propose a network infrastructure that can concurrently support the wireless backhaul link capacity and access link traffic demand in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency band. The RABSs grasping locations, resource blocks (RBs) assignment, and route flow control are simultaneously optimized to maximize the served traffic demands. Robotic base stations capitalize on the fact that traffic distribution varies considerably across both time and space within a given geographical area. Hence, they are able to relocate to suitable locations, i.e., 'follow' the traffic demand as it unfolds to increase the overall network efficiency. To tackle the curse of dimensionality of the proposed mixed-integer linear problem, we propose a greedy algorithm to obtain a competitive solution with low computational complexity. Compared to baseline models, which are heterogeneous networks with randomly deployed fixed small cells and pre-allocated RBs for wireless access and backhaul links, a wide set of numerical investigations reveals that robotic base stations could improve the served traffic demand. Specifically, the proposed mode serves at most 65\% more traffic demand compared to an equal number of deployed fixed small cells.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Robotic Aerial Base Stations (RABSs) assisted mmWave multi-hop network structure.
• Figure 2: Visulaization of spatial traffic distribution.
• Figure 3: Performance of the proposed algorithm when setting different $N$, $\sigma$.
• Figure 4: RB allocation compared with baselines.