A Holistic Approach to Non-Terrestrial 5G Networking with LEO Satellites: Algorithms, Experiments, and Insights

Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) have been proposed as a key component of next generation of mobile networks. Satellite networks can potentially enable connectivity anywhere on earth, and modern satellites are capable of providing high throughput connectivity. However, there remain several open questions about how NTN will work in practice. We show that blindly applying terrestrial RAN architectures and connectivity management algorithms to the NTN context fails to deliver on multiple network and user level metrics. In this work we present an NTN system that takes a holistic view of the problem, considering both the radio access network architecture as well as the algorithms that drive user session orchestration in the face of satellite mobility. Using a realistic satellite emulation platform as well as large-scale simulations we show that our proposed system outperforms baseline solutions in simultaneously balancing multiple key performance indicators including throughput, coverage, and stability by reducing the impact of satellite mobility.