Feasibility of 5G Services Over Ka-band Athena-Fidus Satellite - A Study on Ka-band Frequency Use for 5G based Applications Over Satellite

Abstract

5G is rapidly approaching. Companies and public institutions are investing significantly to design, develop and deploy the next generation telecommunication system which will be based on flexible network management and new service capability. Even in this forthcoming scenario the satellite can play a meaningful role to allow to actually meet all the claimed requirements, i.e. to support/complement terrestrial networks for a large set of applications. The Athena Fidus system has been realized to support civil and governmental services. The assessment of the overall capacity provided by the Italian payload for a number of channels is necessary to evaluate the possibility to exploit multimedia applications. In particular, the nominal IP-based bandwidth per terminal is an important design parameter for the definition of the services and efficiently plan future integration with terrestrial networks in compliancy with 5G scenarios. In this paper, the real characteristics of Athena Fidus DVB-S2/DVB-RCS links are considered to identify the set of services that will be possible to offer. The objective is to draw the operational context to be considered for the potential involvement of Athena Fidus in the next communication systems.