Feasibility of 5G Services Over Ka-band Athena-Fidus Satellite

A Study on Ka-band Frequency Use for 5G based Applications Over Satellite

M. Luglio

, C. Roseti

, F. Zampognaro

and E. Russo

University of Rome“Tor Vergata”, Via del Politecnico 1, 00133, Rome, Italy

Italian Space Agency (ASI), Rome, Italy

Keywords:

5G, Athena Fidus, Link Budget, Ka-band.

Abstract:

5G is rapidly approaching: companies and public institutions are signiﬁcantly investing to design, develop

and deploy the next generation telecommunication systems which will be based on ﬂexible network manage-

ment and new services deﬁnition. In this forthcoming scenario, the satellite can play a meaningful role to

allow meeting all the claimed requirements, i.e., to support/complement terrestrial networks for a large set

of applications. The Athena Fidus system has been realized to support civil and governmental services. The

assessment of the overall capacity provided this platform and, in particular, the nominal IP-based bandwidth

per terminal is important for the deﬁnition of the services and to efﬁciently plan future its integration with

terrestrial networks, in compliance with 5G scenarios. In this paper, the real characteristics of Athena Fidus

DVB-S2/DVB-RCS links are considered to identify the set of services that will be possible to offer. The ob-

jective is to draw the operational context to be considered for the potential involvement of Athena Fidus in the

next communication systems.

1 INTRODUCTION

The design, development and deployment of 5G

telecommunication networks (5G-PPP, 2016) is the

present objective of the major players of the sec-

tor (network operators, service operators and content

providers). Many resources are invested in research

activities and trials by public institutions (e.g., Euro-

pean Commission) or private companies. The race

among far East, Europe and USA has started and soon

the winner, the ﬁrst commercial 5G operational ser-

vice operator, will be known.

The speciﬁcations of these new systems concern

mainly the network management, fully based on Soft-

ware Deﬁned Networking – SDN, Network Func-

tions Virtualisation – NFV, Mobile Edge Computing

– MEC, and on other innovative concepts above the

physical layer and networking legacy assumptions, as

described in (5G-PPP, 2016).

In this new very challenging scenario, the satel-

lite could be fruitfully included in hybrid terrestrial-

satellite communication architectures, to ensure the

full respect of all the requirements and capabilities as-

sociated to the 5G deployment (Luglio et al., 2009b),

(Luglio et al., 2009a), (Bacco et al., 2014). In partic-

ular, satellite data services can be useful for (and not

limited to):

Ubiquitous Coverage for IP Multimedia Commu-

nications. Satellite can allow to extend the broadband

coverage in scarcely populated areas where invest-

ments for terrestrial infrastructures are not econom-

ically viable. Furthermore, satellite could help ter-

restrial providers in responding to users’ capacity re-

quirements in densely populated areas where capacity

demand outstrips the ability of existing terrestrial in-

frastructures, and to compensate as well the intrinsic

asymmetry of some terrestrial services and networks

(i.e., asymmetry of ADSL services, with a very low

upload compared to download).

Global Content Distribution. Satellite can im-

prove efﬁciency in broadcasting contents on large ar-

eas, taking advantage of satellite intrinsic coverage

that put the satellite in a predominant position in ad-

dressing on demand streaming and live broadcasting

services. Currently high deﬁnition (HD), but also 4K

and 8K Ultra HD contents, are consumed by eager

mobile users requiring an efﬁcient content distribu-

tion on distributed edge caches in order to reduce the

latency experienced. Satellite can deliver the contents

right to the edges of the 5G networks, avoiding over-

load the ISP terrestrial networks.

Contribution Services. Thanks to the availabil-

Luglio, M., Roseti, C., Zampognaro, F. and Russo, E.

Feasibility of 5G Services Over Ka-band Athena-Fidus Satellite - A Study on Ka-band Frequency Use for 5G based Applications Over Satellite.

DOI: 10.5220/0006467900330042

In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on e-Business and Telecommunications (ICETE 2017) - Volume 1: DCNET, pages 33-42

ISBN: 978-989-758-256-1

ity of signiﬁcant amount of capacity, the satellite is

(and has been) often utilized as live contribution link

for TV content creation and delivery, from the remote

place to collection centers and then re-distributed in

broadcast (also on satellite, as described in previous

bullet point). Large scale video surveillance, trans-

mission of event-driven high-bandwidth videos, and

other multimedia IP based services require an agile

communication system not constrained by a ﬁxed in-

frastructure and/or reserved capacity. Satellite with its

global coverage does not need of ad-hoc deployment

of an infrastructure and it can manage on-demand up-

link bandwidth as a dynamic and ﬂexible IP broad-

band contribution service.

Speciﬁc Mission Services. Satellite architecture

envisages a limited number of nodes and presents a

relatively short deployment time. These character-

istics make satellite suitable for the support of spe-

ciﬁc services associated to disaster-recovery, tactical

operations, search and rescue missions, with require-

ments drastically different from those associated to

consumer-grade ﬁxed services (e.g., home internet ac-

cess for web browsing, email, etc.).

Connection of a Large Number of Devices. Satel-

lites are tailored to support connectivity for a large

number of devices distributed on a large geographi-

cal scale because of their wide coverage and inher-

ently efﬁcient broadcast/multicast capabilities, com-

plementing local terrestrial data distribution through

the already existing possibility to receive down-

link satellite information. IoT/M2M communications

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) indicates a set of tech-

nologies (sensors or actuators) tailored to exchange

data without an explicit human intervention. Internet

of Things (IoT) concept extends M2M by introduc-

ing IP connectivity to allow interoperability among

different-vendor-systems. Among IoT/M2M require-

ments, it is possible to mention: device multitude,

scalability, intrusiveness, security, burst transmission.

Satellite characteristics can efﬁciently satisfy or at

least help to match such requirements.

The paper investigates the potentiality of using IP-

based bearer services offered by Athena Fidus, show-

ing in details its characteristics, conﬁguration and,

by means of simulations, link budget margins and

achievable bitrates, suitable to support 5G applica-

tions. The results presented will allow to conﬁrm the

possibility to utilize an operational satellite in Ka-

band frequencies, to provide a subset of the above

listed services, with a determined quality of service

and availability.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows:

section 2 includes the description of the Athena

Fidus platform; section 3 describes the detailed radio-

frequency channels speciﬁcation in relation with sys-

tem availability; in section 4 simulations are run to

show link-budget results and relative resulting bearer

channel, and in section 5 conclusions are drawn and

possible future works are described.

2 ATHENA FIDUS

CHARACTERISTICS AND

ARCHITECTURE

The Athena Fidus (Access on THeaters for Euro-

pean allied forces Nations-French Italian Dual Use

Satellite) system (Iorio et al., 2012), (Sacco, 2016)

has been jointly developed by ASI (the Italian Space

Agency) and CNES (Centre National dEtudes Spa-

tiales). The aim was to build a telecommunication

infrastructure able to support/complement terrestrial

networks for a large set of civil and governmental ap-

plications. Athena Fidus is based on a single geo-

stationary satellite operating in the Ka-band and EHF

band, of which Ka allotment is assigned for civil use

and considered in the rest of the paper. The system is

designed to provide in general:

- Star and transparent mesh communication ser-

vices over national coverage in the civilian Ka-

band;

- Star and transparent mesh communication ser-

vices in EHF and Ka-bands over national cover-

age, and steerable spot beams for military use.

As concerns the civil payload, Italy is the geo-

graphical reference area considered for this paper; the

overall expected data rate is over 1 Gbit/s (and pos-

sibly up to 3 Gbit/s). Athena-Fidus uses DVB-RCS

(ETSI, 2005a) for return link communications on a

shared channel, and point to point links (for mesh

communications) or DVB-S2 (ETSI, 2005b) broad-

casting for forward links, to enhance transmission ca-

pacity and service availability.

Athena Fidus current utilization allows to consider

it a potential resource for the launch of new services,

provided that it can assure a suitable amount of net

bandwidth to the target applications. In fact, its raw

capacity is suitable to the transport of IP packets, us-

ing proper encapsulation methods (such as Generic

Stream Encapsulation, GSE), for a wide set of appli-

cations. The capacity available to the 5G/IP based

service depends on the physical characteristics of the

deﬁned satellite channels, taking into account the

ground antenna parameters in terms of EIRP (Equiv-

alent Isotropic Radiated Power, by transmitter) and

G/T (Antenna gain-to-noise-temperature, the speciﬁc

ﬁgure of merit of the antenna in use = G

/T ).

DCNET 2017 - 8th International Conference on Data Communication Networking

Figure 1: Communication Model for the forward link.

Figure 2: Communication Model for the return link.

A representative block diagram of the general sys-

tem architecture is provided for both DVB-S2 (used in

forward link) and DVB-RCS links in (ETSI, 2005b)

and (ETSI, 2005a) (used in return link) and shown

in Figure 1 and Figure 2 respectively. All the func-

tional blocks impact on the overall performance and

contribute to the determination of the Signal to Noise

Ratio (SNR) thresholds for the link budget.

3 SERVICE OVERVIEW AND

CHANNEL DESIGN

In order to perform an exhaustive analysis, we con-

sider a distribution of 2200 terminals, distributed ran-

domly in Italy with the aim to cover all possible terri-

tory speciﬁc characteristic. For instance, rain models

and other parameters considered hereafter, may de-

pend on geographical location of the terminal. Each

terminal location will be used in all the next calcula-

tions and simulations for the service evaluation. As a

baseline reference, the typical values for the current

commercial Ka-band terminals were used: G

=42 dB

and EIRP = 48 dBW (EUTELSAT, 2016). The nomi-

nal IP bandwidth that can be exploited by a Ka-band

terminal by these characteristics can be evaluated tak-

ing into account three main parameters:

- Link availability (%);

- Carrier Symbol Rate (kbit/s);

- Selected Modulation and Coding scheme (MOD-

COD).

Link availability indicates the link uptime over the

year, and it is usually ﬁxed to a target value agreed

with users in the Service Level Agreement (SLA).

The dimensioning of the system envisages ﬁrst the

determination of a reference link availability %, and

then the tuning of the best combination of other pa-

rameters (such as transmitter power, antenna gain,

etc.). Satellite commercial systems typically provide

connectivity based services with 99.7% of availabil-

ity. Of course, most critical services could require

higher values. For these reasons, in the analysis

presented hereinafter, values either equal or higher

than 99.7% will be considered. Table 1 summarizes

the channel breakdown (bandwidth allotment) on the

Athena Fidus transponder. For each channel the main

parameters impacting the link budget computation are

Feasibility of 5G Services Over Ka-band Athena-Fidus Satellite - A Study on Ka-band Frequency Use for 5G based Applications Over

Satellite

reported. In the present study, the star-based network

architecture is considered as a baseline, where Athena

Fidus makes use of a common broadband forward

link, whereas a shared return link is used by many

remote peers along the territory in time division.

The single carrier (broadcast) forward channels

are number 16 and 18, with 75 and 125 MHz band-

widths respectively, making use of DVB-S2 standard.

Then, Athena Fidus offers many carriers to be used in

time division (DVB-RCS) or as exclusive access: the

combination of channel 15 and 17, is in fact further

divided into three classes ((1), (2) and (3) in table 1).

Depending on the supported symbol rate/bandwidth

per channel, this allows to create many narrowband

links, with an overall bandwidth of about 200 MHz.

For each channel class, in fact, a different number

of carriers is deﬁned (last column) and, as reported

in Table 2, a different respective bandwidth in MHz.

Deﬁnitively, the Athena Fidus terminals will be as-

sociated to only one of such carriers for the return

link, and each single carrier can be associated to mul-

tiple terminals competing for the carrier bandwidth

as deﬁned by multiple access techniques required by

DVB-RCS standard. Multiple access (TDMA) is nor-

mally enforced on channel 15+17(1), while the other

2 classes can be used also without contention (one

carrier per terminal).

Once the channels are deﬁned, the Ka-band propa-

gation models (ITU-R, 2007a), (Rytir, 2009), (ITU-R,

2007b), (ITU-R, 2005), (ITU-R, 1999) can be applied

to assess the attenuation margin as a function of the

terminal coordinates/altitude above the sea level and

of the target availability. Taking as a reference the

Athena Fidus coverage, the two frequencies f

=19.8

GHz and f

=29.4 GHz are considered as reference for

downlink and uplinks, respectively.

Table 1: Athena Fidus channel repartition.

Channel # Connectivity

DOW N

Carrier

(MHz) (MHz)

15+17(1)

Star return

29600 19520 10

(DVB-RCS)

15+17(2)

Star return

29600 19520 144

(DVB-RCS)

15+17(3)

Star return

29600 19520 116

(DVB-RCS)

Star forward

29427.5 19887.5 1

(DVB-S2)

Star forward

29302.5 19762.5 1

(DVB-S2)

Figure 3 shows the attenuation due to propagation

effects in the downlink as a function of the terminal

number (1-2200). For a severe availability require-

ment of 99.9%, the attenuation varies in the range 6-

10 dB. It is reminded that the x-axis represent the ter-

Table 2: Athena Fidus channel characteristics.

Channel #

Symbol

Roll-Off

BW per EIRP G/T

Rate carrier density (dB/K)

(MSym/s) (MHz) (dBW/MHz)

15+17(1) 1.9 0.35 2.565 28 9

15+17(2) 0.64 0.35 0.864 28 9

15+17(3) 0.32 0.35 0.432 28 9

16 60 0.25 75 32.5 10

18 100 0.25 125 32.5 10

minal id, from 1 to 2200, randomly positioned in the

Italian territory. Through the simulations it was noted

that the higher attenuation values are encountered for

terminal installations in North-East of Italy. With a

lower availability requirement (i.e. 99.5%), the atten-

uation value drops below 5 dB.

Figure 3: Ka-band attenuation for f = f

= 19.8 GHz.

Figure 4 shows the attenuation margin for the up-

link at f

=29.4 GHz. Overall values are signiﬁcantly

higher than those obtained for f

. This is due to

the greater dependence on rain fading within this fre-

quency range.

Figure 4: Ka-band attenuation for f = f

= 29.4 GHz.

To conlcude, a detailed analysis of “non-linear

losses” in Athena Fidus is provided in (Iorio et al.,

DCNET 2017 - 8th International Conference on Data Communication Networking

2012). The main loss contributions are due to High

Power Ampliﬁers (HPA) distortions, up-conversion

and down-conversion, Input-Multiplexed (IMUX)

and Output-Multiplexer (OMUX) ﬁlters. The main

degradation contributions are summarized in Table 3

and are used for the simulations: they can be com-

bined in Root Sum Square in order to achieve the

overall attenuation value due to non-linear effects.

Table 3: Summary of Athena Fidus non-linear degradations.

Impact of Degradations [dB]

Channel ModCod

Carrier BW AM/AM Phase Group delay Amplitude

(MHz) AM/PM noise variation variation

Fwd link QPSK 1/2

0.3 0.01 0.34 0.1

Ka-band 8PSK 3/4 0.49 0.05 0.93 0.34

4 LINK BUDGET RESULTS

All the parameters discussed in Section 3 have been

modelled and integrated in a MATLAB simulator

aimed to compute link budget for both return and for-

ward link of the target system, at all possible satel-

lite links conﬁgurations. Relevant propagation mod-

els and ITU standards have been considered, speciﬁ-

cally considering the attenuation margins achieved by

previous simulations. The goal of the proposed analy-

sis is to determine, given a certain degree of availabil-

ity associated to a speciﬁc service, the useful channel

capacity (in terms of available bit/s), which is indi-

cated as C

Before computing link budget, the target signal-

to-noise ratio (ideal SNR

), to be used as lower-

bound threshold for the link budget, were determined

as a function of the eligible coding and modulation

schemes and real channel choices. This in turns al-

lows to determine the associated value of capacity

exploitable at the IP level (C

) to support 5G ser-

vices. In particular, the link budget requirements for

a speciﬁc carrier are described in the next sections by

means of:

- Mode - MODCOD reference for possible choice

of “Modulation scheme” and “coding rate”;

- Target (ideal) E

- (as obtained from standards

and test results found in literature, i.e. (ETSI,

2009));

- Spectral Efﬁciency (η) - transmitted bits per

Hertz computed as ratio between IF capacity

and channel bandwidth (C = SR × R

× log

(M),

SR =Symbol Rate, R

=overall coding rate,

M=number of modulation symbols);

- Target (ideal) SNR

- signal to noise ratio com-

puted as E

+ η[dB]+ SR[dB];

The simulations will allow to identify the MOD-

COD to use according to the required availability, for

each of the channel identiﬁed, and then derive the as-

sociated C

(Mbit/s), which is the capacity available

at the IP layer (excluding IP encapsulation overhead

with Generic Stream Encapsulation – GSE). The re-

quired SNR

for decoding and attenuation are eval-

uated for each of the 2200 terminals for all possible

channel conﬁgurations.

4.1 Return Link

4.1.1 Link Budget Requirements and

Calculation of the Nominal Capacity

Considering the channel pool characterized by a sym-

bol rate of 320 kSym/s (carrier 15+17(3)), the maxi-

mum throughput allowed at the IP level is below 400

kbit/s, as summarized in Table 4. This rate is sufﬁ-

cient to set up low data rate services such as messag-

ing, Voice over IP (VoIP), small ﬁle transfer, small

data M2M and sensor networks data exchange. Any-

way, this conﬁguration has not been considered for

the link budget computation because the paper is fo-

cused more in detail for higher data rate capabilities,

which are the most critical to be achieved as well

as the most attractive for upcoming 5G services. If

adopting bandwidth on demand (BoD) techniques, as

described in DVB-RCS standard, the broader chan-

nels (such as, 15+17(1)) can be used to provide these

narrowband services in a sharing mode, more efﬁ-

ciently.

Table 4: DVB-RCS link budget requirements for 320

ksym/s channels.

Mode

Ideal Spectral Ideal C

[dB] efﬁciency (η) SNR

[dB] (kbit/s)

QPSK 1/2 4.5 0.57 57.14 213

QPSK 2/3 5 0.76 58.89 284

QPSK 3/4 5.5 0.86 59.9 320

QPSK 5/6 6 0.95 60.86 356

QPSK 7/8 6.4 1.0 61.47 373

Table 5 summarizes requirements and associated

maximum capacity available at the IP layer over chan-

nels with symbol rate equal to 640 ksym/s (15+17(2)).

The allowed IP capacity ranges from 427 to 747

kbit/s depending on the selected MODCOD. Such

values are compliant with application requirements

of medium data rate such as real time video stream-

ing, ﬁle transfer, web browsing, distributed monitor-

ing (Carniato et al., 2013). In fact, the obtained data

rates are comparable with the ones experienced in the

common ADSL return link, allowing satellite either to

ofﬂoad trafﬁc coming from congested terrestrial net-

Feasibility of 5G Services Over Ka-band Athena-Fidus Satellite - A Study on Ka-band Frequency Use for 5G based Applications Over

Satellite

works or to backup terrestrial links during failures or

outages.

Table 5: DVB-RCS link budget requirements for 640

kSym/s channels.

Mode

Ideal Spectral Ideal C

[dB] efﬁciency (η) SNR

[dB] (kbit/s)

QPSK 1/2 4.5 0.57 60.1 427

QPSK 2/3 5 0.76 61.9 569

QPSK 3/4 5.5 0.86 62.9 641

QPSK 5/6 6 0.95 63.8 712

QPSK 7/8 6.4 1.0 64.4 747

Finally, Table 6 concerns requirements for con-

nectivity over 1.9 MSym/s channels (15-17(1)). Of

course, requirements in terms of C/N

are more se-

vere, while the allowed IP capacity is much higher:

from 1.2 Mbit/s up to more than 2 Mbit/s. With data

rates in this range even wideband services such as HD

TV can be provided. Also this conﬁguration is con-

sidered for link budgets.

Table 6: DVB-RCS Link Budget Requirements for 1.9

MSym/s Channels.

Mode

Ideal Spectral Ideal C

[dB] efﬁciency (η) SNR

[dB] (kbit/s)

QPSK 1/2 4.5 0.57 64.87 1268

QPSK 2/3 5 0.76 66.62 1691

QPSK 3/4 5.5 0.86 67.63 1903

QPSK 5/6 6 0.95 68.59 2114

QPSK 7/8 6.4 1.0 69.2 2220

4.1.2 Link Budget Analysis

Figure 5 shows results of link budget calculations for

the whole set of terminals in terms of SNR

, obtained

by setting the transmitting antenna gain at 42 dB.

Note that the results for different gain values of the

antenna (in dB) can be immediately obtained by lin-

early up or down shifting the curves. The terminals

on the abscissa are ordered from the lowest to the

highest SNR

and the curves are obtained accordingly.

Furthermore, the coloured curves are associated with

different values of link availability selected for the

link budget spanning from 99.3% (yellow curve) up

to 99.9% (blue curve).

Finally, SNR

thresholds for the different coding

schemes supported in the DVB-RCS standard, ac-

cording to Table 5, are represented by dashed lines.

Therefore curves, or portions of a curve, below the

lowest threshold (related to QPSK 1/2 scheme) indi-

cate that the corresponding terminals do not respect

the target availability requirement. On the other hand,

every terminal can efﬁciently work, respecting the tar-

get availability requirement when the relevant curve

is above at least one threshold. Of course, each ter-

minal will use the most efﬁcient MODCOD in case

overcoming more than one threshold. For presenta-

tion convenience, simulated terminals indicated in the

x-axis are ordered from the one with the lowest SNR

to that with the highest one. In this way, the number

of terminals below or above a given threshold can be

easily inferred.

With an availability of 99.9% (blue curve), almost

all terminals are not able to comply with the link bud-

get. A similar situation occurs with 99.8%, where

only about 20% of terminals are above the QPSK

1/2 threshold. Setting availability to 99.7% (typical

value exhibited for commercial services), all the ter-

minals satisfy link budget requirements. Almost 25%

of terminals can even use more efﬁcient MODCODs,

thus working at rates up to 747 kbit/s. Finally, re-

sults improve even more when decreasing availability

requirements. For instance, with 99.3% all terminals

can work at a maximum rate higher than 700 kbit/s.

Figure 6 shows results when considering the high-

est capacity channels of 1.9 MSym/s. In order to guar-

antee that all the terminals satisfy link budget require-

ment, the target availability must go down to 99%.

For higher values (i.e. 99.5%) only a small subset

of terminals complies. On the other hand, while link

budget respects the requirements, the amount of ca-

pacity available at the IP layer is much higher than

the one allowed with the 640 ksym/s channel (in any

conﬁguration). In fact, with availability of 99% all the

terminals can transmit at a maximum rate of at least

1.26 Mbit/s, while about 200 (10% of the total) termi-

nals can achieve up to 1.69 Mbit/s. As a general con-

clusion, these broad channels can be used for broad-

band applications that do not require commercial-like

availability.

4.2 Forward Link - Channel #16

In this section, communication on the forward link

over channel #16, characterized by parameters re-

sumed in the Table 1 and Table 2, is speciﬁcally ad-

dressed. DVB-S2 standard is adopted, enabling a

large number of combinations among modulation and

coding schemes.

4.2.1 Link Budget Requirements and

Calculation of the Nominal Capacity

For each MODCOD, the link budged requires a dif-

ferent SNR to be achieved to guarantee target perfor-

mance as shown in Table 7.

4.2.2 Link Budget Analysis

Target SNR

values are taken as thresholds to be com-

pared to values achieved through link budget compu-

DCNET 2017 - 8th International Conference on Data Communication Networking

Figure 5: Link budgets for 640 kSym/s carriers.

Figure 6: Link budgets for 1.9 MSym/s carriers.

tations related to all the terminals. Results are shown

in Figure 7. With a high availability of 99.9%, the

totality of terminals closes the link budget above the

lower threshold (related to QPSK 1/4) so that connec-

tivity requirement is always respected, giving at IP

layer a capacity of at least 28 Mbit/s. In fact, most

of the terminals are in conditions to work with QPSK

1/2, thus with a net IP capacity of 38 Mbit/s. Setting

a slightly lower availability requirement (i.e. 99.5%),

terminals can use a MODCOD much more efﬁcient

such as the QPSK 5/6 and then exploiting a capacity

of about 95 Mbit/s. In conclusion, the forward link

does not present any particular issue in the considered

scenario. The receiving gain can be reduced of about

8-9 dB (with respect to the reference value), saving

target performance.

4.3 Forward Link - Channel #18

The analysis carried out for channel #16 has been

replicated considering the Channel #18 conﬁguration,

shown in Table 1 and Table 2.

4.3.1 Link Budget Requirements and

Calculation of the Nominal Capacity

Table 8 presents the summary of the link budget re-

quirements and the available capacity at the different

protocol layers for all the allowed MODCODs.

4.3.2 Link Budget Analysis

Results, shown in Figure 8, are very similar to those

experienced in the previous forward link conﬁgura-

Feasibility of 5G Services Over Ka-band Athena-Fidus Satellite - A Study on Ka-band Frequency Use for 5G based Applications Over

Satellite

Figure 7: Link budgets on forward link with Channel #16.

Figure 8: Link budgets on forward link with Channel #18.

tion, in terms of SNR

. Of course, Channel #18 al-

lows the achievement of much higher overall rates,

once ﬁxed the SNR.

5 CONCLUSION

This paper highlights the Athena Fidus potentialities

to play an important role in the provision of the up-

coming 5G services. The current conﬁguration of

Athena Fidus and its peculiar characteristics, can al-

low the simultaneous support to a number of services

with difference performance requirements. Two pa-

rameters must properly analyzed in order to fully sat-

isfy 5G application requirements: the maximum eligi-

ble capacity and the link availability. After an exten-

sive simulation campaign using the actual conﬁgura-

tion and parameters of Athena Fidus, which is already

operational, achievable IP throughput have been eval-

uated for both forward and return links. Results con-

ﬁrmed Athena Fidus ﬂexibility on tuning link char-

acteristics and then achieve the most suitable con-

ﬁguration to support state-of-the art 5G applications.

This work represents a ﬁrst theoretical and thorough

analysis of the Athena Fidus channels available to-

day, for which complete details on the service spec-

iﬁcations are lacking in literature. The satellite has

been launched and it is fully activated: the commer-

cial services are becoming operational in the current

days. The authors are willing to compare the re-

sults achieved in this paper by measures resulting by

real installations, using some test modems distributed

on the national territory in areas identiﬁed through

simulations by peculiar propagation conditions. Fur-

thermore, it will be important to test new transmis-

sion protocols and innovative approaches oriented to

DCNET 2017 - 8th International Conference on Data Communication Networking

Table 7: DVB-S2 Link Budget Requirements for Channel

#16.

Mode

Ideal Spectral Ideal C

[dB] efﬁciency (η) SNR

[dB] (Mbit/s)

QPSK 1/4 -2.35 0.49 75.43 28.53

QPSK 1/3 -1.24 0.65 76.54 38.04

QPSK 2/5 -0.3 0.78 77.48 45.64

QPSK 1/2 1 0.98 78.78 57.06

QPSK 3/5 2.23 1.18 80.01 68.47

QPSK 2/3 3.1 1.32 80.88 76.08

QPSK 3/4 4.03 1.48 81.81 85.59

QPSK 4/5 4.68 1.58 82.46 91.29

QPSK 5/6 5.18 1.65 82.96 95.1

QPSK 8/9 6.2 1.76 83.98 101.44

QPSK 9/10 6.42 1.78 84.2 102.7

8PSK 3/5 5.5 1.77 83.28 102.7

8PSK 2/3 6.62 1.98 84.4 114.12

8PSK 3/4 7.91 2.22 85.69 128.38

8PSK 5/6 9.35 2.47 87.13 142.65

8PSK 8/9 10.69 2.64 88.47 152.16

8PSK 9/10 10.98 2.67 88.76 154.06

16APSK 2/3 8.97 2.63 86.75 152.16

16APSK 3/4 10.21 2.96 87.99 171.18

16APSK 4/5 11.03 3.16 88.81 182.59

16APSK 5/6 11.61 3.3 89.39 190.2

16APSK 8/9 12.89 3.52 90.67 202.88

16APSK 9/10 13.13 3.56 90.91 205.41

32APSK 3/4 12.73 3.7 90.51 213.97

32APSK 4/5 13.64 3.95 91.42 228.24

32APSK 5/6 14.28 4.11 92.06 237.75

32APSK 8/9 15.69 4.39 93.47 253.6

32APSK 9/10 16.05 4.45 93.83 256.77

Table 8: DVB-S2 Link Budget Requirements for Channel

#18.

Mode

Ideal Spectral Ideal C

[dB] efﬁciency (η) SNR

[dB] (Mbit/s)

QPSK 1/4 -2.35 0.49 77.65 47.55

QPSK 1/3 -1.24 0.65 78.76 63.4

QPSK 2/5 -0.3 0.78 79.7 76.08

QPSK 1/2 1 0.98 81 95.1

QPSK 3/5 2.23 1.18 82.23 114.12

QPSK 2/3 3.1 1.32 83.1 126.8

QPSK 3/4 4.03 1.48 84.03 142.65

QPSK 4/5 4.68 1.58 84.68 152.16

QPSK 5/6 5.18 1.65 85.18 158.5

QPSK 8/9 6.2 1.76 86.2 169.07

QPSK 9/10 6.42 1.78 86.42 171.18

8PSK 3/5 5.5 1.77 85.5 171.18

8PSK 2/3 6.62 1.98 86.62 190.2

8PSK 3/4 7.91 2.22 87.91 213.97

8PSK 5/6 9.35 2.47 89.35 237.75

8PSK 8/9 10.69 2.64 90.69 253.6

8PSK 9/10 10.98 2.67 90.98 256.77

16APSK 2/3 8.97 2.63 88.97 253.6

16APSK 3/4 10.21 2.96 90.21 285.3

16APSK 4/5 11.03 3.16 91.03 304.32

16APSK 5/6 11.61 3.3 91.61 317

16APSK 8/9 12.89 3.52 92.89 338.13

16APSK 9/10 13.13 3.56 93.13 342.36

32APSK 3/4 12.73 3.7 92.73 356.62

32APSK 4/5 13.64 3.95 93.64 380.4

32APSK 5/6 14.28 4.11 94.28 396.25

32APSK 8/9 15.69 4.39 95.69 422.67

32APSK 9/10 16.05 4.45 96.05 427.95

5G communications on the real satellite links, as in

(Luglio et al., 2009a), (Cataldi et al., 2009) and (Ab-

delsalam et al., 2015),(Abdelsalam et al., 2017).

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DCNET 2017 - 8th International Conference on Data Communication Networking