Various embodiments disclosed herein provide for an enhanced timing advance scheme to support MU-MIMO in an integrated access and backhaul system. The timing advance scheme disclosed herein aligns the arrival time between backhaul links and access links to enable MU-MIMO gain at the receiver side. In the integrated access and backhaul system, which comprises distributed nodes, the timing advance offset for an access link transmission (a transmission to a node further away in hops from the core network, or to a user equipment device) can be modified by offsetting it with the timing advance of the backhaul link (e.g., from a parent node). This enables the arrival time for transmissions, both access link transmissions from the UE or child node, and backhaul link transmissions from a parent node to arrive at the same time.