Speaker
Description
With 3GPP Release 17, satellites were incorporated in the 5G New Radio standard. This significantly strengthens the role of satellite connectivity for future mobile networks. 5G and 6G non-terrestrial networks bridge gaps in terrestrial network coverage, ensuring seamless connectivity in unconnected zones. Due to this, the ongoing project ESA 6G LINO focuses on creating an open experimental evaluation platform. Hereby, the acronym LINO stands for "Laboratory IN Orbit" and therefore will provide a flexible and reconfigurable system to deploy custom experiments. The project consortium consists of multiple partners across Europe, namely TESAT, OpenCosmos, University of Surrey, VTT, Deutsche Telekom and Fraunhofer IIS. The overall goal of the project is the creation of all necessary system parts, including space, ground and user segment, and the demonstration of a fully functional 5G New Radio base station in space. Moreover, the integration of LEO satellites in mobile communication networks will be developed which means maintaining the End2End connectivity while performing the handover procedure of a TN to an NTN connection, for instance. The satellite will be a 16U cubesat and the payload incorporates an AMD Versal platform. The launch is scheduled for next year for a polar orbit with an altitude of 500km to 600km.
In order to demonstrate different operational scenarios, a flexible onboard processing platform has to be utilized. This flexibility is provided by a system consisting of the Adaptive Versal System-On-Chip which performs the computational tasks and a power-efficient Lattice FPGA as system supervisor unit. The fundamental demonstration will be the End2End connection deploying a 5G-NR NTN base station – so-called gNodeB – onboard the satellite which is the baseline for further upgrading to 6G features. Another use case will cover the conditional handover scenario between terrestrial and non-terrestrial 5G-NR base stations. Independently of the 5G and 6G topics, an optimization of spectrum usage is a general key factor for high-throughput systems. Therefore, spectrum monitoring and accompanying AI-based training of spectrum allocation algorithms can provide significant improvement to tackle degradations due to interference. The embedded AI engines as part of the Versal platform enable this efficiently. Lastly, new 6G waveforms will be evaluated that are able to encounter the common problems with the 5G-NR OFDM waveform, e.g. the high peak-to-average-power-ratio. After testing and deploying the use cases within the project consortium, this flexible onboard processing platform will be available to the public for testing of individual experiments in any field. This is possible due to the high degree of reconfigurability that is assured by the system concept.
Affiliation of author(s)
Fraunhofer IIS
| Track | FPGAs: High Performance |
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