Traffic Aware Beamformer Design for Integrated Access and Backhaul with Flexible TDD

Integrated access and backhaul (IAB) networks consist of IAB-donor, IAB-nodes, and user-equipments (UEs). Both IAB-donor and IAB-node provide access to UEs while IAB-donor and IAB-nodes exchange UEs data via wireless in-band backhaul using the same frequency-time resources shared with access links. Multi-antenna beamformer techniques can be used to mitigate the complicated cross-link interference scenarios arising from IAB systems. In this paper, an iterative beamformer design with the weighted queue minimization (WQM) objective is proposed for the time-division-duplexed (TDD) based IAB system. In the considered TDD based IAB model, in a given timeslot, IAB-nodes and IAB-donor are assumed to be different uplink (UL)/downlink (DL) transmission modes to mitigate conventional half-duplex loss. Also, the beamformer design is carried out over two timeslots, considering both UL and DL transmission at each node. Specifically, user-specific UL/DL queues are introduced at the IAB-nodes to guarantee the BS to/from UE data delivery. The proposed beamformer solution is based on the iterative evaluation of Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions of the optimization problem, which can practically be implemented in both centralized and decentralized manner. The numerical examples illustrate the superior system performance of the proposed method in comparison to the conventional half-duplex relaying system.