CHINA COMMUNICATIONS From Earth to Space A First Deployment of 5G Core Network on Satellite

2025-04-26 0 0 4.65MB 11 页 10玖币

CHINA COMMUNICATIONS

From Earth to Space: A First Deployment of 5G Core Network

on Satellite

Ruolin Xing1, Xiao Ma1, Ao Zhou1, Schahram Dustdar2, Shangguang Wang1, *

1State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876,

China

2Distributed Systems Group, TU Wien, 1040 Vienna, Austria

*The corresponding author, email: sgwang@bupt.edu.cn

Abstract:

Recent developments in the aerospace in-

dustry have led to a dramatic reduction in the manu-

facturing and launch costs of low Earth orbit satellites.

The new trend enables the paradigm shift of satellite-

terrestrial integrated networks with global coverage. In

particular, the integration of 5G communication sys-

tems and satellites has the potential to restructure next-

generation mobile networks. By leveraging the net-

work function virtualization and network slicing, the

orbital 5G core networks will facilitate the coordina-

tion and management of network functions in satellite-

terrestrial integrated networks. We are the ﬁrst to de-

ploy a lightweight 5G core network on a real-world

satellite to investigate its feasibility. We conducted

experiments to validate the onboard 5G core network

functions. The validated procedures include registra-

tion and session setup procedures. The results show

that the 5G core network can function normally and

generate correct signaling.

Keywords:

5G Core Network; Satellite Communica-

tions; Satellite Internet

I. INTRODUCTION

Traditional terrestrial communication systems have

ﬂourished in many ways. Especially, the 5G networks

have enabled much higher data rate, ultra low latency,

and massive network capacity [

]. However, there

Received: TBD

Revised: TBD

Editor: TBD

are still some inherent disadvantages that are difﬁcult

to resolve [

]. Mobile networks have poor coverage

in remote areas. They suffer long-distance transmis-

sion delays. Besides, vulnerability to natural disasters

makes terrestrial communication systems unavailable

in extreme cases. Meanwhile, the advancements in

aerospace technology have brought the satellite indus-

try a resurgence, from serving vertical ﬁelds to pro-

viding more universal services. Previously, operators

provided limited communication services to dedicated

users through geostationary satellites. Recent projects

like Starlink have used low Earth orbit (LEO) constel-

lations to deliver global broadband Internet access.The

urgent needs and the rapid developments boost the in-

tegration of satellites and 5G systems. In addition, the

signiﬁcance of incorporating satellites is not merely

enhancing terrestrial networks. The dominant class of

services is content delivering, which takes about 90%

of the total trafﬁc in telecommunication networks. The

satellites will have better cost effectiveness in broad-

casting/multicasting connectivity and makes the ser-

vices more convenient.

There have been numerous efforts devoted to the in-

tegration of 5G and satellites [

]. The 3rd generation

partnership project (3GPP) initiated activities towards

non-terrestrial networks that study the role of satel-

lites in 5G and acknowledge long-term research within

B5G and 6G [

]. Besides, prior works [

] inves-

tigated the standardization of non-terrestrial networks.

Reference [

] further summarized the networking chal-

lenges for non-terrestrial networks in the 5G ecosystem.

China Communications 1

arXiv:2210.05405v1 [cs.NI] 11 Oct 2022

Studies [

] focused on the satellites which were

used as a complement for radio access networks in 5G

communication systems. Technology companies like

Lynk, OmniSpace, Vulcan Wireless, Lockheed Mar-

tin, and AST SpaceMobile have already combined 5G

and satellite to enable direct connections between user

equipments and satellites. While researchers explored

the advantages brought by the satellites being a part

of transmission networks [

]. In addition, satellite

networks can bring extra use cases for the 5G network

slicing, which has been studied in [14-15].

5G core networks have evolved into software-deﬁned

communication systems based on virtualization tech-

nology [

]. With the explosive growth in scale and

business, the management, operation, and maintenance

of satellite networks will be more complex. Beneﬁted

from software-deﬁned networking and network func-

tion virtualization, 5G core networks can achieve dis-

tributed deployment and elastic scaling[

]. Migrating

some functions of 5G core networks to satellites can

connect users and data networks more ﬂexibly. With

these techniques, 5G core networks have the potential

to be used to implement a satellite-terrestrial integrated

network[

]. There are also studies on the role of core

networks in the 6G era [

]. Some core network

functions can be moved onboard to gain more ﬂexi-

bility and efﬁciency [

]. In-orbit core networks may

suffer from signaling storms and the data session migra-

tions. To address these challenges, [

] has proposed a

prototype of in-orbit core networks, which adopted a

stateless design.

This paper aims to study the convergence of satellites

and 5G core networks. In this direction, we introduce

the motivations for deploying the 5G core network func-

tions onto satellites. Next, we provide an overview of

the satellite capabilities with onboard 5G core networks.

We then propose an architecture of a satellite-terrestrial

integrated network. The architecture shows the advan-

tages of the onboard 5G core network. Finally, we

present the deployment and experiment procedures of

the 5G core network on the satellite. It is the ﬁrst at-

tempt to setup a satellite-terrestrial integrated network

with the 5G core network deployed on a real-world

satellite.

II. MOTIVATIONS

2.1 Main Aspects

Demand Perspective

The costs of launching and

manufacturing satellites continue to decrease. The LEO

constellations are expected to expand exponentially in

the near future [

]. Onboard computing, communica-

tion, and storage resources will also usher in a period

of explosive growth. Based on that, deploying core

networks on satellites becomes practical. Meanwhile,

traditional satellite services like remote sensing, navi-

gation, and communications have great needs for com-

puting power. The demand for in-orbit computing will

drive the deployment of additional satellite services.

With the 5G core networks onboard, mobile users can

access the satellite services more conveniently.

Performance Perspective

The terrestrial mobile

core networks tend to sink to the edge. The purpose is

to reduce the transmission delay and improve the qual-

ity of user experience. The onboard core networks will

beneﬁt from the low-latency and wide-coverage links

of LEO satellites. The terrestrial ﬁber paths are gener-

ally long-winded, in which the light travels at roughly

2c/3 [

]. While most of LEO satellites are orbiting at

500 km to 1,000 km above the Earth’s surface. Previ-

ous study [

] showed that the LEO satellite constel-

lation can achieve a 50% improvement in latency over

today’s terrestrial networks. For typical end-to-end

connections, even the relatively small constellation can

(almost always) achieve latencies better than the best

possible with ﬁber. Thus, the onboard core networks

can get a considerable performance gain compared to

the terrestrial ones. Additionally, onboard core net-

works eliminate unnecessary backhauling which takes

a large fraction of the network latency. As a result,

onboard core networks will reduce the control plane

signaling interaction delay and speed up the user access

procedures.

Functional Perspective

According to the 3GPP tech-

nical report, satellites will have base station functions

and be a part of access networks[

]. Access net-

works rely on core networks to provide mobility man-

agement, session management, and other functions.

Based on that, the onboard 5G core networks can bene-

ﬁt in two ways. Firstly, the onboard 5G core networks

2China Communications

StorageComputing

Extended Functions

Basic Functions

User Plane FunctionSession Management

Access Control and

Mobility Management

Satellite Platform

Command and Data

Handling Subsystem

Payload Subsystem

Communication

Subsystem

Network ExposurePolicy ControlNetwork Slicing

Virtualization

Storage

Communication Computing

5G Core Capabilities

Virtualization Layer

Hardware Layer

Function Layer

Figure 1. The capability structure of satellites with orbital 5G core networks.

will make users be able to get the satellite services

without backhauling. Secondly, the satellites with base

station fuctions can be managed more conveniently by

the onboard rather than the terrestrial core networks.

Due to the continuous change in relative position of

LEO satellites, the connections between satellites and

ground stations are usually unavailable. It means that

satellites are out of the control of the core network

most of the time. Onboard core networks can inte-

grate with future access networks which are made up

of large-scale LEO satellite constellations.

2.2 Use Cases

Orbital Edge Computing

Edge computing on LEO

satellites is gaining popularity recently [

]. Tra-

ditional satellites generally adopt the bent-pipe archi-

tecture which does no modiﬁcations to the downloaded

data. The alternative is using the onboard payloads

to do speciﬁc processing tasks. Typical applications

include remote sensing, in-orbit AI inferencing, and

space storage. The onboard core network can help to re-

alize in-orbit edge computing services for mobile users.

Additionally, the inter-satellite links (ISLs) can reduce

the dependence of constellations on ground stations.

Co-orbiting satellites can achieve large-scale and un-

interrupted services through collaboration. Deploying

core networks in such constellations can ensure higher

availability of edge computing services.

Emergency Communication

The combination of

satellite and 5G core network provides a better op-

tion for emergency communications. On the one hand,

satellite communication can solve the problem of emer-

gency communication when the ground infrastructure

is damaged. The main beneﬁts of satellite communica-

tion are wide coverage and large transmission capacity.

when an emergency occurs, the satellite can act as a

base station and core network facility to route trafﬁc to

any data network. On the other hand, the deployment

of lightweight core networks on dedicated satellites

can be regarded as an upgrade of satellite communi-

cation capabilities. The original remote sensing and

experimental satellites will be transformed into satel-

lites with emergency communication capabilities after

the deployment.

III. OVERVIEW OF THE ONBOARD 5G

CORE NETWORK

The renaissance of satellite networks began with re-

duced launch costs and pipe-lined satellite production.

Large-scale commercial deployment of 5G core net-

works on satellites will soon be possible due to the

growing resources of communication, computing, and

China Communications 3

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

10 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载

摘要：

CHINACOMMUNICATIONSFromEarthtoSpace:AFirstDeploymentof5GCoreNetworkonSatelliteRuolinXing1,XiaoMa1,AoZhou1,SchahramDustdar2,ShangguangWang1,*1StateKeyLaboratoryofNetworkingandSwitchingTechnology,BeijingUniversityofPostsandTelecommunications,Beijing100876,China2DistributedSystemsGroup,TUWien,1040Vienn...

展开>> 收起<<

CHINA COMMUNICATIONS From Earth to Space A First Deployment of 5G Core Network on Satellite.pdf

共11页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

CHINA COMMUNICATIONS From Earth to Space A First Deployment of 5G Core Network on Satellite

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: