A New Relaying Protocol For 5G Small Cell With Wireless Backhaul Channels

In this paper, we propose a network coding enabled wireless backhaul (NC-WB) for the next generation small cell networks. NC-WB aggregates the access and backhaul links to the same frequency band for wireless backhaul small cells. The smallcell base stations (SBS) generate the network coded functions of the signals coming from user equipments (UE) and macrocell base station (MBS), i.e., SBS does not separate incoming composite signal but map it into a linear combination of Tx signals instead. The resulted network coded functions are broadcasted to UEs and MBS. This design allows MBS and UE to exploit the side information and network coded functions to extract the desired signals. Compared with the conventional relaying protocol in wireless backhaul small cells, the proposed approach almost doubled the spectral efficiency.