Empowering Rural Areas With Energy-Efficient 5G IAB-Based Fixed Wireless Access Network

Abstract

Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) has recently emerged as a cost-effective alternative to optical fiber in rural areas, particularly where fiber deployment is economically infeasible. To extend coverage and increase capacity, FWA networks have begun to integrate Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) with mid- and high-band spectrum. However, the energy consumption of multi-hop IAB networks scales significantly with the number of hops, a challenge that prior research has not adequately addressed. This paper proposes an energy-efficient framework that minimizes network energy consumption by maximizing Resource Block (RB) utilization while avoiding both over- and under-allocation in multi-hop IAB-based FWA deployments. The proposed method jointly allocates RBs and selects modulation and coding schemes across a mixed set of 5G numerologies to satisfy data rate requirements while minimizing energy consumption. The inherent dynamic interactions among IAB stations render the problem highly complex and non-convex; therefore, we design a disciplined multi-convex programming supported by dynamic programming algorithms to obtain tractable solutions. Furthermore, we introduce a transformer-based prediction to forecast RB distribution, thereby mitigating the need for frequent short-timescale coordination among IAB stations. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves the required data rates while reducing energy consumption by 14%.