Microwave Backhaul Topology Planning for Wireless Access Networks

With the fast growth of Internet traffic, wireless access networks are facing a big challenge to provide even higher bandwidth to users, which requires upgrading wireless backhauls. In this paper, we consider optimal topology planning for microwave-based wireless backhaul networks. Considering a range of constraints such as avoidances of microwave link crosses, small angles between neighbouring links, and long-distance links, we aim to plan for a backhaul topology that guarantees a minimum total cost. We develop an Integer Linear Programing (ILP) optimization model and an efficient heuristic algorithm to tackle the problem. Our studies show that the proposed heuristic approach is efficient to plan for a microwave wireless backhaul network whose total cost is close to the ILP optimization result under different network planning scenarios.