Assessment of 5G NR Physical Layer for Future Satellite Networks

The performance, error rate and synchronization, of recently released 5G New Radio (NR) physical layer (PHY) with typical satellite scenarios are assessed in this paper. Four propagation channels in Ka band are considered and implementation constraints are modeled. The conclusions highly depend on the channel type. For open rural and high speed train (300 km/h) scenarios, 5G NR PHY may be used as is. Higher speed scenarios (aero 1000 km/h) can benefit from the 5G NR mode that allows very short symbols (although this mode is only allowed for large band). Finally, we demonstrate that amendments should be considered in the standard for supporting 2-state channels (suburban for example), due to the long fading periods.