Satellite 5G: IoT Use Case for Rural Areas Applications Sastri Kota University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Email: sastri.kota@gmail.com Giovanni Giambene CNIT - Dept. Information Eng. and Math. Sciences, University of Siena, Siena, Italy, Email: giambene@unisi.it Abstract—One of the key drivers for next-generation mobile communications, 5G, is the support of the Internet of Things (IoT) with billions of objects being connected to the Internet with low latency. The 5G technology will support the realization of smart cities, smart environments, and big data applications. Within the 5G framework, the terrestrial services can be augmented with the recent development of High Throughput Satellite (HTS) systems and mega-Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. In this paper, we investigate the integration of 5G technology and IoT by means of an aerial component composed of drones and satellites for a rural scenario. The prospected system can provide enhanced services, e.g., fire alarm detection, smart agriculture, animal tracking, and plant disease control. A use case of an agriculture application consisting of a number of areas whose sensor data are collected via drones is described. The proposed architecture consists of the drones connected to a satellite system to provide the necessary network control and connectivity. Subsequently, the satellite segment is connected to the terrestrial network and then to the cloud. In this study, we refer to a rural area scenario where drones are used to detect fire alarms collecting sensors data on the field, aggregating them, and then delivering messages via satellite to a control center. An analytical model has been developed to characterize the distribution of the time to detect and deliver an alarm. This study depends on many parameters; in particular, we have investigated the impact of the area size served by a drone, the maximum sensors range, and the sensor duty cycle. Keywords–5G; Satellite Networks; UAVs. I. I NTRODUCTION Recent studies estimate that about 4 billion people still lack Internet access [1]. The cost of a pure terrestrial coverage will quickly become unbearable with the increasing capacity needs for rural, remote, and urban areas. Moreover, terres- trial networks cannot guarantee the access to the Internet to passengers on aircrafts or high-speed trains, as well as users on vehicles on highways or in the countryside. Under these challenging operational conditions, the terrestrial infrastructure has to be complemented by the satellite segment as envisaged by 5G communication systems. Satellites will also support machine-type communications, paving the way to new appli- cations, ranging from smart agriculture, environmental protec- tion, transportation, animal tracking, etc. The new 5G system will be an umbrella system, enabling different Radio Access Networks (RANs) to operate together, including terrestrial base stations [now called g-Node Bs (gNBs)], aerial platforms of different types, including drones and satellites [2]. It is commonly assumed that 5G systems must address several challenges, including higher capacity, higher data rate, lower end-to-end latency, massive device connectivity, reduced cost and consistent Quality of Experience (QoE) provisioning [3]. ITU-R M.2083 Recommendation classifies three differ- ent 5G scenarios, as Enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB), massive Machine-Type Communications (mMTC), and Ultra- Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) [4]. The satellite systems can support these scenarios as follows: 1) eMBB: Users in under-served areas, passengers on board vessels or aircrafts, disaster relief 5G services, emergency communications, media, and entertain- ment content broadcasts, passengers on board public transport vehicles, etc. These applications can be supported by satellite systems at different altitudes, such as Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Medium Earth Orbit (MEO), and GEostationary Orbit (GEO). 2) mMTC: Global continuity of service for telematic applications based on a group of sensors/actuators. This scenario is more suitable for lower orbit satel- lites, like LEO constellations. 3) URLLC: Satellite systems (referring here mainly to LEO cases) can support URLLC-like services that require high reliability and high availability but that do not need extremely-low latency because of the large propagation delays. This paper deals with, on the one hand, the system char- acteristics of the aerial component of future 5G systems and, on the other hand, with a use case of the mMTC type for rural areas monitoring, fire alarm, pollution detection, etc. This paper has been developed within the framework of the 5G satellite working group of the 5G IEEE Roadmap initiative [5]. After this introduction, this paper is organized as follows: Section II provides a survey on the state of the art of multi- layer architectures explaining the originality of this work; Section III deals with the aerial component (i.e., drones and satellites) of 5G systems; a system architecture is described in Section IV; sensor technologies are detailed in Section V; our case study dealing with the monitoring of rural areas by means of sensors connected via drones and satellites is provided in Section VI; finally, Section VII draws concluding remarks. II. STATE OF THE ART In view of future 5G systems, a multi-layer architecture is envisaged where low altitude drones, Unmanned Aerial Vehi- cles (UAVs) and High Altitude Platforms (HAPs) can be jointly used to provide a focused coverage or coverage extension to 5G systems with the support of a satellite component with LEO and/or GEO satellites. Layers typically correspond to the 7 Copyright (c) IARIA, 2019. ISBN: 978-1-61208-694-1 SPACOMM 2019 : The Eleventh International Conference on Advances in Satellite and Space Communications