Potential of mMTC Support over Low Earth Orbit Systems: Challenges and Preliminary Assessment

Inhalt:
The Internet of Things (IoT) market is evolving at an unprecedented pace, enabling new applications in both civilian and industrial sectors. A large body of new use cases, such as maritime applications or forestry, requires service provisioning in remote regions, where terrestrial connectivity does not always exist. The recent 3GPP initiative to extend the 5G connectivity to non-terrestrial segments may allow massive machine-type communication (mTC) services to be provided ubiquitously. The aim of this study is to first outline the challenges related to the non-terrestrial implementation of the mMTC radio interface and then perform a preliminary assessment of one of the leading 5G mTC technologies, narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), for non-terrestrial communications provisioned by low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. Our results indicate that with the current NB-IoT releases, communication at the LEO is feasible without any major changes in standard numerology. Notably, a transmission power of less than 45 dBm is required to achieve a block error rate (BLER) <10%with only a single repetition for transport block size (TBS) of up to 408 bits.