The activities performed in the first phase of the project, i.e. from January 2023 until end of June 2024 were pretty much aimed at identifying the use case and to come up with the foundation of the system architecture from system requirements standpoint and in terms of overall building blocks to be further analysed and then developed throughout the project to achieve the expected scientific impact of the project as well as provide its value from a real system standpoint by means of a dedicated PoC. More details are then further summarised in the following:
1) Study and identification of the main scenarios to be addressed in the design of the 5G-STARDUST system and essentially consisting in mobile transportation sector, PPDR, NG automotive scenarios, private networks.
2) Overall system engineering by first working out user and mission requirements and derive accordingly system requirements.
3) Full system architecture definition, on the basis of the so-defined system requirements in terms of key building blocks belonging to the satellite and terrestrial segments and the related integration through the well-defined interfaces.
4) Definition of the end-to-end service architecture on the basis of self-organised networking paradigm, able to exploit full network softwarisation on ground and in space and hence let the system to dynamically adapt to time-varying traffic and network conditions.
5) Definition of the proof-of-concept architecture and main components according to the selected scenario and the baseline architecture, with the final objective of proving the feasibility of gNB operations in space.
Upon the finalisation of the architecture definition, the main building blocks pertaining to the implementation of the radio interface on the one hand and then the networking operation on the other hand have started to be analysed and accordingly simulated or accommodate for testbed implementation. In this respect, main effort has been devoted to the definition of user-centric beamforming solution and first iteration on optimised RRM techniques for what concerns the radio interface definition. On the other hand, the networking operations study has mostly addressed the support for multi-link connectivity by resortng to ATSSS-like capabilities and hence building on MPQUIC and MPTCP functionalities located by the core network. The ongoing study has also considered the overall control framework, with an overarching orchestration architecture able to achieve specific QoS/QoE objectives. Last but not the least, more detailed discussion on the regenerative payload architecture has started as well on the basis of the preliminary findings already elaborated in the architecture study conducted during the first year of the project. In general, it is expected that consolidated results about all these aspects will be published in the second part of the project and further strengthened through the demonstrations to be carried out over the PoC. As to this latter point, the overall architecture has been defined as well as the main SW/HW components, whose actual integration is expected to start from Fall 2024 and conclude by late Spring 2025, in order to expoit the remaining months of the project for conducting experimentations and promote the results in key dissemination venues.
