# An Integrated Access and Backhaul Approach to Sustainable Dense Small Cell Network Planning
## 5 Conclusions  
This paper provides insights into IAB network planning, imbued with a commitment to reducing the environmental impact and enhancing adaptability to a dynamic deployment strategy. Our approach capitalizes on the flexible deployment characteristic inherent to the IAB network, anchoring our optimization objective to minimize the number of node deployments. Our efforts have produced significant advancements, predominantly through the formulation and resolution of a single-hop network deployment strategy in the context of a dense donor distribution, which is directly responsive to the location challenges associated with IAB donors. We extended this progress to multi-hop scenarios for sparse donor environments, formulating an optimized network deployment strategy that caters for networks with arbitrary hop counts, while maintaining a keen focus on the geographical location of IAB donors. Challenging the conventional methodologies, we harness the intrinsic data rate constraints, which is substantiated by a link budget analysis, within donors to determine the maximum feasible hops, marking a departure from the practice of defining a rigid maximum hop count. This, in turn, offers a more nuanced and adaptive constraint to network length. The sustainable ethos, characterized by minimized environmental intrusion and enhanced adaptability to dynamic urban exigencies, underscores the relevance and applicability of our findings in contemporary and future network deployment scenarios. To solve the non-convex problem, we proposed a greedy algorithm, which effectively addresses the challenges associated with multi-hop network deployment. It is within this context that we showcase how IAB deployment is intricately influenced by geographical constraints, coverage constraints, and data rate considerations. In conclusion, our study elevates the discourse on IAB network planning, offering nuanced insights and innovative methodologies that are attuned to the imperatives of sustainability, efficiency, and adaptability. Our contributions resonate with broader contexts of mmWave and higher-frequency bands deployments, particularly where the exigencies of location constraints are pronounced. Conceptualization, J.Z. ; methodology, J.Z. ; software, J.Z. and Q.W. ; validation, J.Z. and Q.W. ; formal analysis, J.Z. and Q.W. ; investigation, J.Z. ; data curation, J.Z. ; writing--original draft preparation, J.Z. ; writing--review and editing, Q.W., P.M. and H.A. ; supervision, P.M. and H.A. ; project administration, P.M. and H.A. ; funding acquisition, H.A. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. This research received no external funding. Figure 13: Comparison of average nodes deployed against the number of donors, differentiated by potential node distance from 10 m to 50 m. Potential node locations are distributed equidistant in a 1000 \(\ast\) 1000 area and each distance showcases a distinct trend in node deployment as the donor count varies. **Data Availability Statement:** No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable to this article. **Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.