On the Use of NB-IoT over GEO Satellite Systems with Time-Packed Optical Feeder Links for Over-the-Air Firmware/Software Updates of Machine-Type Terminals

Abstract

The verticals of 5G, such as the automotive, smart grid, and smart cities sectors, will bring new sensors and IoT devices requiring Internet connectivity. Most of these machine-type terminals will be sparsely distributed, covering a very large geographical area and, from time to time, will have to update their software, firmware, and/or other relevant data. Given this situation, one viable solution to implement the “Over-the-Air” update of these IoT terminals can be done with the aid of GEO satellite systems. However, due to the ultra-dense radio frequency reuse factor that contemporary High-Throughput Satellite (HTS) systems implement in the access link to serve the IoT terminals, the use of a time-packed Free Space Optical (FSO) link represents a practical solution to avoid the bottleneck that the satellite gateway experiences in the feeder link. The performance of both Detect-and-Forward and Decode-and-Forward relaying strategies are studied, assuming that the single-carrier M-PAM symbols that are transmitted on the optical feeder link are mapped into M-QAM symbols that modulate the multiple sub-carriers of the OFDM-based radio access link. In addition, the benefits of encapsulating the NB-IoT frames into DVB-S2(X) satellite frames is also analyzed in detail. The effects of the impairments introduced in both the optical feeder and radio access links are characterized in detail, and the end-to-end error correction capabilities of the Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS) defined in the contemporary releases of the NB-IoT and DVB-S2(X) standards are studied for different working regimes.