SAT 5G

Link to project website:No Longer available.

Social media: Twitter @SaT5G_Project

Contact: SaT5G-Contact@5g-ppp.eu

Objective

The project vision was to develop a cost effective “plug and play” satcom solution for 5G to enable telcos and network vendors to accelerate 5G deployment in all geographies and at the same time create new and growing market opportunities for satcom industry stakeholders.

The six principal project objectives were to:

1. Leverage relevant on going 5G and satellite research activities to assess and define solutions integrating satellite into the 5G network architecture;
2. Develop the commercial value propositions for satellite based network solutions for 5G;
3. Define and develop key technical enablers for the identified research challenges;
4. Validate key technical enablers in a lab test environment;
5. Demonstrate selected features and use cases;
6. Contribute to the standardisation at ETSI and 3GPP of the features enabling the integration of satcom solutions in 5G.

Achievements:

• 3GPP integration to satellite links, so that the satellite gateway presents as Non-Terrestrial Network (NTN) gNB and satellite remote terminal presents as NTN UE to a 5G core network,
• Reference and detailed architectures developed for integration of satellite with 5G networks,
• The development of several satellite-specific VNFs to enable integration of satellite with terrestrial networks, and their deployment on both Kubernetes and OpenStack,
• Live demonstrations of 5G services over satellite, both GEO and MEO, with satellite in the backhaul, connecting 5G RAN to core network. The use-cases demonstrated are backhaul to gNBs on towers and also on moving platforms (aircraft),
• Service slice creation and management over satellite using OSM orchestration of VNFs. Instantiation of satellite segment of the slice through northbound interface between OSM and satellite OSS,
• Multicast over live GEO and MEO satellite links, with latency-reducing content fetching and broadcasting to network edge,
• Multi-cast over live GEO satellite, demonstrating hybrid delivery of broadband to premises, with parallel satellite and terrestrial paths and adaptive load balancing,
• Simulations of 5G new radio (NR) over satellite links, showing modifications needed in the uplink random access process and timing advance to cope with the satellite delay and Doppler, and the large cells created by satellite,
• Significant contributions to standards, over 200 contributions to 3GPP and ETSI.
• Industry days held in November 2019 in UK, and in February 2020 in Germany, to demonstrate our four main use-cases. These use-cases are backhaul to 5G cells, multicast of content to network edge, multi-linking to enhance broadband to premises, and connectivity to moving platforms,
• Techno-economic analysis that gives a cost-benefit analysis for the main use-cases.

Project Participants: