Abstract
Reliable service provisioning is crucial to the public safety (PS) communications especially when network outage happens. Isolated E-UTRAN operation, introduced in LTE Release 13, is able to host separate core network functions at the base stations (BSs) to provide limited set of services to the users. However, a significant issue remains to be solved is to coordinate among BSs to create an autonomous network and enhance service availability and reliability. In this paper, an in-band LTE self-backhauling operation leveraging the relay interface is proposed to create an autonomous mesh network of BSs. This calls for an efficient resource allocation for multiple unplanned backhaul links between BSs. To this end, we present a cross-layer scheduling problem for in-band self-backhauled LTE network, and provide a interference-aware hierarchical resource allocation algorithm that is able to meet specific quality of service (QoS) requirements for real-time traffic while adapting to the workload of other types of traffic, through efficient leverage of FDD capabilities and network frequency re-use. Finally, a thorough evaluation on our proposed approach is realized via extensive simulations on different network topologies and diverse traffic flows, and the results demonstrate our work effectiveness utilization of available resources to satisfy QoS requirements.