Periodic Reporting for period 1 - 5G-STARDUST (Satellite and Terrestrial Access for Distributed, Ubiquitous, and Smart Telecommunications)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2023-01-01 do 2024-06-30
The 5G-STARDUST project was selected from the Stream A of the first SNS call, with respect to radio ubiquitous access and hence exploring as well ultimately proving the feasibility of converging terrestrial and non-terrestrial 5G network under the same telecommunication ecosystem in the context of 3GPP 5G-Advanced wave. Moreover, the ambition and plan of 5G-STARDUST is to overall promote the added value offered by NTN technology in supporting existing and new services and hence possibly influence the selection of technology candidates for the upcoming 6G communication systems. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that the main focus of the project is on 5G-Advanced and its evolution, whereby a dedicated proof-of-concept will be also developed by the end of the project. In the ambition of showing how an integrated system can deliver TN and NTN services together, the main technology objectives relate to 1) exploitation of an onboard regenerative payload for NTN systems, 2) unified air interface able to exploit AI-based RRM optimisations stategies and enable user-centric beamforming, 3) self-organised network architecture, 4) definition of multi-connectivity solution to exploit the availability of TN and/or NTN network segments. To attain these goals, the project will conduct research investigation to increase the maturity level of the developed concepts and eventually prove the main features as part of a dedicated PoC, targetting a TRL4. In nutshell, the main ambition of the project is then to demonstrate the feasibility of gNB operations in space, by showing how the integration of a gNB in real satellite is achievable and then which are the implications of such a concept on the overall architecture and in particular on the overall design of the space segment from a SWaP perspective.
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.
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.
The work conducted so far is pretty much aligned with the current view on satellite stakeholders with respect to achieving a 3D network, building on regenerative payload able to accommodate gNB functionalities in space. In that respect, the project positions as the first one at EU level able to deliver such a vision and demonstrate the value of such a technological proposition by means of dedicated simulations especially for what concerns the features relevant for the implementation of the unified radio interface and then in terms of real functions implementation for the overall system implementation in the form of a PoC. As such, main results collected so far that go beyond the state of the art relate to the a full converged e2e network architecture relying on gNB functionalities deployed on both space and ground segments and then be able to meet the diverse requirements of verticals and users through optimal RRM based strategies in such an hybrid configuration.
Likewise another added value is the procurement of an integrated PoC reproducing together both TN and NTN network functionalities and show the converged picture, where real gNBs and emulated satellite can interwork with realistic mobile network deployments, by making use of the available core network implementations as well as of sophisticated channel emulators to take into account all the impairments possibly happening on the user link of LEO constellations and accordingly tune the radio interface of a 5G-native NTN segment.
Likewise another added value is the procurement of an integrated PoC reproducing together both TN and NTN network functionalities and show the converged picture, where real gNBs and emulated satellite can interwork with realistic mobile network deployments, by making use of the available core network implementations as well as of sophisticated channel emulators to take into account all the impairments possibly happening on the user link of LEO constellations and accordingly tune the radio interface of a 5G-native NTN segment.