Connecting Rural Areas: an Empirical Assessment of 5G Terrestrial-LEO Satellite Multi-Connectivity

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The digital transformation accomplished in recent years in the agricultural, farming, forestry, and transport industries has led to a series of emerging connectivity-based use cases that demand ubiquitous coverage. In such a scenario, Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), and their integration with Terrestrial Networks (TN), will play a key role to achieve global and seamless connectivity. This paper evaluates the current service provided by cellular terrestrial networks in rural areas and proposes and investigates a multi-connectivity solution for the use of TN and NTN to improve such service. Experimental data was gathered along a route covering more than 250 km in a rural area, using two multi-band cellular modems connected over public 5G non-standalone (NSA) cellular networks from two different operators and a SpaceX Starlink User Terminal (UT) connected to the Starlink Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network. The multi-connectivity solution that we propose can be easily implemented, and results show that having an additional link to a satellite network avoids service degradation due to a lack of cellular coverage in up to 20 % of the route. The proposed solution also allows achieving round-trip latency targets of 100 ms with 99.99% reliability.