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DYNAmic spectrum sharing and bandwidth-efficient techniques for high-throughput MIMO SATellite systems

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DYNASAT (DYNAmic spectrum sharing and bandwidth-efficient techniques for high-throughput MIMO SATellite systems)

Reporting period: 2020-12-01 to 2021-11-30

In the context of next-generation satellite networks, DYNASAT aims at researching, developing, and demonstrating the use of innovative techniques for bandwidth-efficient transmission and efficient spectrum usage, such as dynamic spectrum allocation (DSA) and sharing and multi-satellite cooperative multi-user multi-input, multi-output (MIMO). More specifically, DYNASAT will assess and demonstrate how such techniques, part of which have been already adopted in terrestrial networks, can be designed to significantly improve the performance of a satellite network infrastructure fully integrated into the 5G ecosystem. This is crucial to serve the mass market and professional 5G user equipment also in unserved or underserved areas.
DYNASAT is organised in two main phases; one covering the first twelve months and the second one covering the remaining sixteen months. During the first period, DYNASAT addressed the architecture design, the development of bandwidth efficiency transmission and spectrum sharing techniques, the initial organisation of a public demonstration, and the dissemination of the initial project results.

The designed infrastructure aims to serve the mass market and professional 5G user equipment; thus, the selected targeted services are broadcast/multicast via satellite, digital divide, coverage extension, and maritime coverage. All services address pedestrians with class 3 handheld equipment, as described by 3GPP. They correspond to commercial smartphones, in FR1 (<3GHz), for direct access. The related satellite and New Radio parameters are also based on 3GPP requirements, for an S-band system, which are used to have a preliminary estimation of link budgets. To evaluate the performance gain achieved by using bandwidth-efficient techniques on an NGSO-based 5G system, two different architectures have been defined. The first architecture, called “5G baseline architecture”, is based on a 5G constellation addressing handheld terminals, ensuring only simple visibility (i.e. each UE will have only one satellite in view). It corresponds to Release 17 approach in 3GPP, and it considers the radio unit on-board (part of the transparent architectures in 3GPP NTN Rel.17 Work Item). In the second architecture, the constellation is designed under the constraint to always have more than one satellite in view to allow the use of advanced bandwidth-efficient techniques while also adopting spectrum sharing approaches. Coverage overlaps, time synchronisation, and sharing between TN and NTN have been described. A preliminary constellation analysis has been provided for the DYNASAT solution based on a global coverage solution with satellites at around 600 km of altitude. In this framework, the characterization of the operational constraints for a satellite access infrastructure that would share the spectrum of a cellular network has also been performed. The investigation covered both the mobile satellite bands and a range of cellular bands.

Based on the architecture design and the regulatory analysis, the project started investigating two main categories of bandwidth-efficient techniques, i.e. multi-user multi-input, multi-output (MU-MIMO) techniques and multi-connectivity techniques that will be demonstrated at the EuCNC 2022 along with the dynamic spectrum sharing approaches for terrestrial and non-terrestrial 3GPP networks. Specifically, DSA are considered for two scenarios. The first scenario addresses coordinated spectrum sharing between terrestrial and non-terrestrial network transmissions in a frequency resource sharing scheme. The second scenario addresses a non-coordinated spectrum sharing where the transmissions of each network are white noise for each other.
DYNASAT aims at completing the design and dimensioning of a new architecture for the use of bandwidth-efficient and spectrum sharing techniques and to demonstrate them at the MWC2023. The technologies and features developed in the DYNASAT project will enhance the economic performances of a direct to handset space connectivity system, more precisely a multi hundreds of satellites constellation. DYNASAT envisions that the developed technologies and features will result in an additional economic performance of 5% or more in terms of RoI, and a 20% reduction of capacity cost when compared to a non-DYNASAT enhanced system.
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