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5G New Radio Evolution Meets Satellite Communications:

Opportunities, Challenges, and Solutions
Huzaifa Tahir Zulkaif Ahmed M. Ahmad Ahsan
Department of Electrical Department of Electrical Department of Electrical
Engineering Engineering Engineering
University of Management and University of Management and University of Management and
Technology (UMT) Technology (UMT) Technology (UMT)
Lahore, Pakistan Lahore, Pakistan Lahore, Pakistan
F2017019044@UMT.EDU.PK F2017019060@UMT.EDU.PK F2017019100@UMT.EDU.PK

Abstract— As the world is progressing day by day, so is the
networking area is making its progress. In past years we have seen
the network has shifted from 3G to 5G. So 3GPP completed their
first global partnership project based on 5G New Radio. It is done
as they wanted 5G to grow and to take it to the commercial level
success. So now a question arises that what will be the next
achievement in 5G NR? 3GPP is considering to attached 5G NR to
a satellite. So in this article, we will discuss the evolution of 5G NR
and the technical challenges which were faced during the
connectivity of 5G NR with the satellite. We will also discuss the
solution to these challenges.
Keywords— 5G, New Radio, Satellite Communications, Non-
Terrestrial Networks
I. INTRODUCTION TO 5G NEW RADIO (5G NR)
5G New radio is the latest addition to the pocket of 3GPP and it
is also referred to as new radio access technology (RAT). The
5th generation (5G) wireless access technology also known as
new radio (NR) consist of several feature from which some of
the features are flexibility of spectrum, ultra-lean design,
forward compatibility, low latency, and advanced antenna
techniques. It is specially designed to meet the requirements of
5G mobile network so it can interface itself with the 5G network
air interface. The study for this technology was started in 2015
by 3GPP but the specification was exposed by 2017 to the world.
In 2018, Phase-1 of 5G new radio in released 15, while phase-2
started in March 2020 and phase 3 is expected to start by the end
of 2021.
Initially, 5G NR which will be released will depend on the
technology of 4G LTE interface in a Non-Standalone Mode
(NSA) before it is interfaced with Standalone Mode. Ooredoo
was the first company referred as the carriers who were to launch
a commercial network of 5G NR in Qatar in May 2018. After
that other carriers followed and them and launched this
commercial network in their working areas. 5G NR consists two
bands on the basis of frequency which are as follows:
• Frequency Range 1, included a 6-GHz band.
• Frequency Range 2, including bands in the mm-
Wave range of 24-100 GHz.
It is assumed that interfacing of satellite with the 5G NR
network will provide anything, anytime, and anywhere
connectivity in the 5G and will surely go beyond it also.
II. SUMMARY OF THE ARTICLES
A. Introduction
The 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) has been the
dominating standardization development body of several
generations of mobile technology. The technology effort helps
and ensure compatibility among purchasers and reduce cost and
operation maintenance for the device. In contrast, the
interactions between different satellite solution groups has been
difficult and the availability of devices is not so much easy,
leading to an overall disintegrate satellite communications
market up to date.
The satellite industry has realized the importance of this
technology so now they have joined forces with the mobile
industry in 3GPP. This evolution of 5G standards has provided
a decent and a golden opportunity to re-observe the
characteristics and limitation of satellite communications. The
satellite industry has been active in the 3GPP 5G standards
process.
B. Objective
The objective of this article is to investigate the opportunities
and challenges under the light of 5G NR that will be having the
feature of satellite communication. This technique was also
applied in the 4th Generation of a mobile network. There are
many articles published that throws light upon the latest
technology of 5G NR but this article will comprise of the
analysis and the challenges faced by the developers during the
making of 5G NR.
III. BASICS OF SATELLITE COMMUNICATION
Satellite communication in telecommunication is that by
using artificial satellite which provides a link of communication
between the satellite and various parts of the earth.
A. Atitechture of satellite communication
In the architecture of communication through satellite, there
are many components before reaching to the mobile which is
making the connection with the satellite. This component
includes a service link, feeder link, and a gateway for
communicating with each other
The below figure illustrates the architecture of Satellite
Communication:
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Figure 1: An illustration of satellite communications system architecture

As illustrated in the diagram the components are present. Now B. Characteristics of Satellite Communication
we will discuss these components one by one in detail: In this section, we will discuss the salient characteristics of
1. Satellite: spaceborne platform including spacecraft satellite communication
bus for satellite operation and payload. 1. Varying coverage in time and space
2. Terminal: Used by a user for communication. There are two types of satellites used in this article
3. Gateway: a path to connect the satellite to other for getting the result. One of the is Geostationary
parts of the network. Satellite (GEO) while the other on Low Earth Orbit
Satellite (LEO). As GEO is static there are
4. Feeder Link: Communicating link between the infrequent updates in spot beam to cover more
satellite and the gateway. geographical area while the latter one leads to
5. Service Link: Communicating link between the varying converge in time and space.
satellite and the terminal. The figure gives the result obtained at different
Depending on the implemented functionality of the heights of varying converge
communication payload of the satellite in the system in
figure 1, we can consider two payload options: bent-pipe
transponder and regenerative transponder. With a bent-pipe
transponder, the satellite receives the signal from any of the
transmitter placed on Earth, amplifies the received signals so
the signal does not lose information, and sends the signals to
the earth place receivers with conversion in the frequency
under the scope of uplink-downlink. The other one is
regenerative transponder in which the satellite performs
processing for demodulation and decoding of the received
signals and regenerates the signals for further process of
transmission.
A modern satellite uses a multi-spot beam technology to
generate high power beams so that it can cover a
geographical area to some extent. The beam shape is usually
elliptical and is probably equal to the size of the cell in the
network. The radii of this beam depend on some factors Figure 2: Varying coverage in satellite communications with polar orbiting
which are as follows: satellites at three different orbital heights
• Design of the communication system of 2. Propagation Delays
satellite.
Rapid Interaction between the two mediums is
• Its range can be tens of kilometers to few possible since the delay between them is only 1ms. But
thousand kilometers. when communicating with satellite comes it take a bit
much longer time. The propagation time delay between a
GEO and ground is 119.3ms.

Figure 4: Doppler effects in satellite communications with polar orbiting satellites and carrier frequency of 2 GHz: subfigure (a)
shows service link Doppler shift trajectories of a static reference UE #0 as a function of time at three orbital heights; subfigure (b)
shows the trajectories of service link Doppler shift difference of reference UE #0 and static UE #i, i=1, 2, 3, as a function of time at
600 km orbital height.
The propagation delay time in LEO is much less than that of
GEO Satellite and it can be shown in the figure illustration.
The second figure above concludes that the larger the spot
beam radius, the larger the maximum differential delay in the
spot beam.
3. Doppler Effects
Doppler effect refers to the change of frequency of a
wave due to the movements of the source, observer,
and/or objects in the propagation environment. It depends
on the relative speed of motion and the carrier frequency.
In mobile communications systems, Doppler effects are
typically caused by the movements of the source that can
be the signal provider and surrounding objects, while in
satellite systems the satellite movement is the key for the
additional Doppler effects.
Doppler effect in LEO is quite pronounced while in GEO
it is negligible. This technology has been designed to
handle the magnitude of Doppler shift values. For a
satellite communications system operating at a higher
frequency, the Doppler shift increases but this can be
handled by 5G NR
C. Designing Aspect
In this section, we describe the key areas that require
adaptation to evolve 5G NR for satellite communications.
• Uplink Time Control
• Frequency Synchronization
• Hybrid Automatic Repeat request
• Idle Mode UE tracking and paging
5G NR uses Orthogonal frequency-division multiple access
(OFDMA) scheme in the uplink. One promising approach is the
3
Global Navigation satellite system (GNSS) based techniques.
Each source is equipped with a GNSS chipset which determines
its position, calculates its propagation delay concerning the
serving satellite using data of the satellite and derives the initial
timing advance value.
As there is a doppler effect in the communication path so it can
also be removed. If there is any requirement of lowering down
the large effects of doppler shifts which are occurred due to the
movement of satellite from one place to other in non-GEO
satellite then pre-compensation is the process applied to forward
link signals. A time-varying frequency offset tracking the
Doppler shift is applied to the forward link reference frequency
such that the forward link signals for a spot beam received at a
reference point which appears tohave zero Doppler shift. Due to
this the effect of the shift becomes equal to the original doppler
shift location. Hence the effect is been reduced to some extent.
To fight against transmission errors, 5G NR uses a combination
of forwarding error correction and automatic repeat request
(ARQ), which is known as hybrid ARQ (HARQ). Paging is the
mechanism that the network uses to build a connection with a
source in idle mode. When the source is in connected mode, the
network fully controls the serving cell of the source.
IV. ANALYSIS OF THE ARTICLE (POINT OF VIEW)
After the deep analysis of the project, it is observed that in
this article the publisher has exceptionally done well. This article
gives you each detail about the new technology known as 5G
NR. This article has given the challenges and solutions to this
NR technology. The author has told everything about the NR in
a very comprehensive manner. The thing he has missed is that
he could make a section in which he could tell us the phase 1
and phase 2 improvements done by 3GPP in their releases rather
than just telling us they have released their publications and also,
he can show us the result achieved by 3GPP in the previous
generation and new generation of a mobile network.
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At last, but not least he could have mentioned more REFERENCES

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