A method for uplink (UL) wireless backhaul communication at a wireless backhaul remote unit in a radio access network comprising receiving a configuration for radio frames and a transmission schedule through a downlink (DL) physical layer broadcast channel, wherein the transmission schedule comprises a transmission allocation for the remote unit, generating a UL data frame, wherein generating the UL data frame comprises performing forward error correction (FEC) encoding on a data bit stream to generate a plurality of FEC codewords, wherein performing the FEC encoding comprises performing Reed Solomon (RS) encoding on the data bit stream to generate a plurality of RS codewords, performing byte interleaving on the RS codewords, and performing Turbo encoding on the byte interleaved RS codewords to generate one or more Turbo codewords, wherein each Turbo codeword is encoded from more than one RS codeword, and transmitting the UL data frame according to the transmission allocation.