Hop-constrained mmWave backhaul: Maximising the network flow

This letter investigates millimetre wave (mmWave) backhaul network flow as affected by the interplay between deployment/topology, hardware architectures of the nodes and the number of hops while taking into account minimum demand per a node. The objective is to maximise the network flow, for a given deployment, based here on the Madrid-grid model. The optimisation problem firstly minimises the number of fibre-connected nodes to meet the hop-constraint, followed by the maximisation of flow to meet the constraints on the number of radiofrequency (RF) chains on the node and minimum demand. The results show that by minimising the number of hops, the network flow generally increases but requires a higher number of fibre-connected nodes, while, at the same time, the total number of RF chains in the network is reduced.