Max-Min Fair Resource Allocation in Millimetre-Wave Backhauls

5G mobile networks are expected to provide pervasive high speed wireless connectivity and support increasingly resource intensive user applications. Network hyper-densification therefore becomes necessary, though connecting to the Internet tens of thousands of base stations is non-trivial, especially in urban scenarios where optical fibre is difficult and costly to deploy. The millimetre wave (mm-wave) spectrum is a promising candidate for inexpensive multi-Gbps wireless backhauling, but exploiting this band for effective multi-hop data communications is challenging. In particular, resource allocation and scheduling of very narrow transmission/ reception beams require to overcome terminal deafness and link blockage problems, while managing fairness issues that arise when flows encounter dissimilar competition and traverse different numbers of links with heterogeneous quality. In this paper, we propose WIHAUL, an airtime allocation and scheduling mechanism that overcomes these challenges specific to multi-hop mm-wave networks, guarantees max-min fairness among traffic flows, and ensures the overall available backhaul resources are fully utilised. We evaluate the proposed WIHAUL scheme over a broad range of practical network conditions, and demonstrate up to 5× individual throughput gains and a five-fold improvement in terms of measurable fairness, over recent mm-wave scheduling solutions.