This is a final project for the GSMA Capacity building Course "Advanced Spectrum Management for Mobile Telecommunications".

The project presents an insight into a 3GPP proposal for 5G termed "Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB)" or Self-Backhaul. With increasingly dense deployments of base stations (especially Small Cells), it would not always be feasible to connect fibre to all of these small cells to provide the needed high capacity and low latency backhaul links. However, Millimetre Wave represents a cost-effective alternative by leveraging the abundant chunks of capacity in the bands, and short wavelength which allows for spatial isolation, beam forming and Massive MIMO potentials.
As a result, integration of access and backhaul is possible whether in-band or out-of-band.
The project highlights the mm wave spectrum features, the backhaul challenge and the proposed self-backhauling solution. Advantages and Disadvantages of the IAB solution is presented, and some open issues discussed for efficient implementation. Lastly, real life demonstrations of the IAB scheme are shown, and some concluding remarks presented.

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