Performance Analysis of Wireless Mesh Backhauling Using Intelligent Reflecting Surface

This paper considers the deployment of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) technology forwireless multi-hop backhauling of multiple basestations (BSs) connected in a mesh topology. Theperformance of the proposed architecture is evaluated in terms of outage and symbol errorprobability in Rician fading channels, where closed-form expressions are derived and demonstratedto be accurate for several cases of interest. The analytical results corroborated by simulation, showthat the IRS-mesh backhauling architecture has several desired features that can be exploited toovercome some of the backhauling challenges, particularly the severe attenuation at high frequencies.