The role of the new constellations of satellites systems in 5G

The 3GPP has definitely standardized the main scenarios that will lead to the specification of requirements for the provisioning of 5G services. According to these scenarios, very high throughput will be requested and the access for several thousands of devices should be guaranteed in the local area [1]. In particular, the throughput provisioning will be 1000 times higher than that requested to provide actual services. Furthermore, latency decrease will be required for real time services (<1ms) as well as to guarantee the access to the IoT devices in the local area. Availability, reliability, robustness will be required to answer to the 5G standardized scenarios. In parallel, the main satellite operators are investing to create global networks able to provide very high throughput solutions on wide areas. These systems are based on HTS (Hugh Throughput Satellite) satellite on Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and new constellations on the Low/Medium Earth (LEO, MEO) orbits. In the past the satellite and terrestrial systems working groups used to work independently with the result to postpone possible integrations between the two different communications eco-systems. In many cases, (non-standardized) solutions for integration were achieved directly by the product developers [2] to answer to specific requirements. In this paper we investigate about the role of satellites in the novel 5G networks. The discussion takes into account for the characteristics of the novel LEO and MEO constellations able to provide throughput on the order of Gb/s and reduced latency. The possibility for the satellite to directly provide a subset of 5G services with no integration with terrestrial infrastructure is also investigated i.e. the satellite based 5G (Sat5G).