Outdoor Experiment of mmWave Meshed Backhaul for Realtime Edge Content Delivery

In recent years, ultra-broadband communication using densification of millimeter-wave (mmWave) small cell base station (SC-BS) has attracted attention owing to its ability to accommodate increasing mobile data traffic. To make full use of mmWave access, deploying ultra-broadband backhauling lines such as optical fibers everywhere is an extremely expensive approach. mmWave meshed network is therefore a cost-efficient wireless backhaul architecture for mmWave overlay cellular network. Owing to its wide bandwidth and flexibility in link connection via beam steering and multi-hop relay, mmWave meshed network is furthermore suitable for dynamic construction of backhauling in adaptation to change of user traffic’s distribution via adaptive allocation of backhaul resources of densely co-located users (UE). On the other hand, as users nowadays want to experience services everywhere without disruption even when moving, it is desirable that UE-specific multimedia contents are located as close as possible to the UE via Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) technology. Covering all the above requirements, this paper aims to construct a real UE-centric edge content delivery system in which content server is re-located in adaptation to UE’s context information e.g. location, via dynamic routing over mmWave meshed backhaul network, enabled by Software Defined Network (SDN) technology. Using our developed WiGig device based testbed, outdoor experiment campaign is conducted in the university campus with various measurement scenarios. This paper describes the overall testbed architecture and the conducted outdoor experiment with preliminary results revealing the effectiveness of the proposed system.