Field Trial on 5G New Radio Over Satellite

5G New Radio (NR) is the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) radio access technology for the next generation mobile communications network. A major evolution of 5G constitutes the integration of non-terrestrial networks including geostationary and low Earth orbit satellites. The seamless integration of satellites in the terrestrial mobile network requires significant adaptations within the radio access network and the development of new features in the core network to cope with the specific satellite channel characteristics. To date, the 5G control and data plane has been standardized to handle only continuous backhaul communication between the network components. However, a mobile satellite enabled next generation Node B (gNB) located in a vehicle or in a moving aerial platform needs to be able to handle frequent backhaul outages of various duration as well as longer signal delays as opposed to short terrestrial connections via fiber. In this paper, we report the results of an over-the-air (OTA) field trial comprising a mobile edge node connected to the 5G standalone core network components over a geostationary satellite. We analyze Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) acceleration and GPRS Tunneling Protocol (GTP)/TCP/Internet Protocol (IP) header compression features through the GTP. Moreover, the influence of short and long interruptions in the communication between the edge node and the central components on the entire system performance is investigated. The header compression and TCP acceleration modules were implemented on the satellite modems and are now part of the protocol stack of these devices. The results show up to 12% higher data rates for the 5G user equipment (UE), on a 1.5 MHz single carrier return link compared to deactivated TCP acceleration and header compression. We increased the data rate by 20% on the 4.5 MHz DVB-S2X forward link between the UE and 5G core. Moreover, our measurements reveal that even satellite-enabled gNB mobility is possible with the current Release 15 standard. After a short outage of the satellite connection due to shadowing, the UE can successfully re-establish the user plane connection to the core network. Our results will facilitate the full integration of satellite components in 5G through open and standard solutions.

Device Discovery and Context Registration in Static Context Header Compression Networks

Due to the limited bandwidth of Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN), the application layer is currently often tied straight above the link layer, limiting the evolution of sensor networks distributed over a large area. Consequently, the highly efficient Static Context Header Compression (SCHC) standard was introduced, where devices can compress the IPv6 and upper layer protocols down to a single byte. This approach, however, assumes that every compression context is distributed before deployment, again limiting the evolution of such networks. Therefore, this paper presents two context registration mechanisms leveraging on the SCHC adaptation layer. This is done by analyzing current registration solutions in order to find limitations and optimizations with regard to very constrained networks. Both solutions and the current State-of-The-Art (SoTA) are evaluated in a Lightweight Machine to Machine (LwM2M) environment. In such situation, both developed solutions decrease the energy consumption already after 25 transmissions, compared with the current SoTA. Furthermore, simulations show that Long Range (LoRa) devices still have a 80% chance to successfully complete the registration flow in a network with a 50% Packet Error Ratio. Briefly, the work presented in this paper delivers bootstrapping tools to constrained, SCHC-enabled networks while still being able to reduce energy consumption.

Cooja Based Approach for Estimation and Enhancement of Lifetime of 6LoWPAN Environment

Background and Objective: The Scale with which Internet of Things (IoT) is penetrating our day to day life, time is not far away when it would be the Internet of Everything (IoE) that will require billions of devices to communicate with each other in the real world. To cater to the same, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is composed of 6LoWPAN sensor-nodes, which are mainly battery operated. One of the major issues, in such network, is nodes’ limited lifetime which is battery dependent. Methods: In this paper, we have suggested and implemented an approach for ‘Estimation and Enhancement of Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Network’ (E&EL-WSN). The aim of our study is to suggest an approach that helps in power saving of the batteries of sensor-nodes and will result in enhanced life-time of 6LoWPAN environment. Our suggested approach is based on the concept of reduced packet size resulting in saving of power consumption. Packet size is reduced by our Modified and Improved Header Compression (MIHC) method of IPv6 header compression. Results: The simulation, done in Cooja, shows, in our case, an improvement of approximately 19% saving of power consumption. This results in an enhancement of 70 days in the lifetime of the network, which is almost 23% better than the existing approach.