This paper considers the deployment of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) technology for

wireless multi-hop backhauling of multiple basestations (BSs) connected in a mesh topology. The

performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated in terms of outage and symbol error

probability in Rician fading channels, where closed-form expressions are derived and demonstrated

to be accurate for several cases of interest. The analytical results corroborated by simulation, show

that the IRS-mesh backhauling architecture has several desired features that can be exploited to

overcome some of the backhauling challenges, particularly the severe attenuation at high frequencies.