5G mobile networks are expected to provide pervasive high speed wireless
connectivity, to support increasingly resource intensive user applications.
Network hyper-densification therefore becomes necessary, though connecting to
the Internet tens of thousands of base stations is non-trivial, especially in
urban scenarios where optical fibre is difficult and costly to deploy. The
millimetre wave (mm-wave) spectrum is a promising candidate for inexpensive
multi-Gbps wireless backhauling, but exploiting this band for effective
multi-hop data communications is challenging. In particular, resource
allocation and scheduling of very narrow transmission/ reception beams requires
to overcome terminal deafness and link blockage problems, while managing
fairness issues that arise when flows encounter dissimilar competition and
traverse different numbers of links with heterogeneous quality. In this paper,
we propose WiHaul, an airtime allocation and scheduling mechanism that
overcomes these challenges specific to multi-hop mm-wave networks, guarantees
max-min fairness among traffic flows, and ensures the overall available
backhaul resources are fully utilised. We evaluate the proposed WiHaul scheme
over a broad range of practical network conditions, and demonstrate up to 5
times individual throughput gains and a fivefold improvement in terms of
measurable fairness, over recent mm-wave scheduling solutions
