An innovative architecture employing wireless backhaul in hierarchical wireless networks is considered in this paper to provide high throughput densities. Multi-beam antennas, combined with aggressive frequency reuse have recently been exploited to increase the throughput density in densely deployed wireless networks. However, large number of narrow beams cause not only co-channel interference but also inter-cell interference. To mitigate this problem, amplitude tapering in multi-beam antennas is investigated in this paper. Results show that tapered beams significantly improve the carrier to interference ratio from 5 to 8 dB and consequently achieve downlink throughput density over 0.65 Gbps/km $$^2$$ 2 . An overall throughput density of 1.2 Gbps/km $$^2$$ 2 is expected when taking both up- and downlinks into account.