Dynamic Nomadic Node Selection for Performance Enhancement in Composite Fading/Shadowing Environments

Next generation mobile and wireless communication systems beyond 2020, aka Fifth Generation (5G) systems, aim at providing ubiquitous user experience with the utmost in quality. One of the promising technologies targeted for 5G systems is the flexible network deployment based on nomadic nodes (NNs). An NN is a low-power movable access node that provides coverage extension and capacity improvement on demand. Yet, NNs require flexible backhaul. One possible cost-efficient realization for flexible backhaul is in-band relaying. In this context, the capacity of the wireless backhaul link between an NN and its serving base station (BS) has a crucial role in the achievable end-to-end performance. The flexible backhaul can be exploited by dynamic NN selection to overcome the limitations of the backhaul link and, thus, to enhance the system performance. To this end, dynamic NN selection is carried out via selecting the serving NN from a set of available candidates considering the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) on the backhaul link. In this regard, coarse NN selection takes into account only shadowing. Nevertheless, as NNs are stationary or slowly moving during operation, the wireless channels pertaining to NNs are usually subject to simultaneous impairments by both shadowing and multi-path fading, i.e., composite fading/shadowing. In this paper, we present the performance of coarse NN selection in composite fading/shadowing environments with co-channel interference. Further, we evaluate the performance in terms of backhaul link SINR, link rates, and end-to-end rate. Results show that coarse NN selection can yield high performance improvements.