PARTNERS: EURESCOM, FRAUNHOFER FOKUS, FRAUNHOFER IIS, NEWTEC, SES, TU BERLIN, UNIVERSITÄT DER BUNDESWEHR
The SATis5 testbed will implement, deploy and evaluate an integrated satellite-terrestrial 5G network, showcasing the benefits of the satellite integration with the terrestrial infrastructures in order to increase the trust in the newly developed 5G technologies and to foster their adoption. The SATis5 testbed will also support the standardisation initiatives of the satellite community especially towards 3GPP by providing practical validations.
The SATis5 testbed will demonstrate a set of relevant satellite use cases for 5G in the areas of enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and massive Internet of Things (mIoT) deployments. The SATis5 testbed infrastructure is based on the 5G Berlin testbed and extends it with over-the-air satellite networking using SES’s owned GEO and MEO state-of-the-art satellite fleet. It brings the level of integration of satellite networks on par with their terrestrial counterparts through end-to-end demonstrators.
With three edge locations in Betzdorf, Berlin, Erlangen and a mobile/nomadic one aimed at demonstrations across Europe, the SATis5 testbed includes a set of state-of-the-art toolkits and prototypes for both the terrestrial and satellite networks starting from radio network prototypes, Fraunhofer’s Open5GCore and Fraunhofer’s OpenBaton next to the latest satellite modem technologies, and provides a comprehensive basis for customised network deployments for the specific use cases and demonstrations acting as a best-practice path finder for the 5G trialing phase.
SATis5 builds on the results of the successful ESA SATINET project in which some components were already integrated in the 5G Ready Trial Platform of Fraunhofer FOKUS, indicating that a comprehensive end-to-end integration will provide the expected support for the 5G use cases as well as enabling the integration with other testbed infrastructures. Results available from other relevant EU and ESA projects will also incorporated in the SATis5 testbed.
For this first implementation of a distributed 5G environment supporting the federation with other European testbeds a new set of software components will be developed that are currently missing from the testbeds in Europe, such as the support to end-to-end orchestration across loosely coupled testbed areas, remote management of testbed locations, the security of the interconnection across diverse and unreliable backhauls and location-to-location optimised routing.
The SATis5 testbed is built under the ESA ARTES activity “SATis5: Demonstrator for Satellite Terrestrial Integration in the 5G Context” (ESA Contract No. 4000120663/17/NL/CLP), funded by the European Space Agency and it is expected to be ready for live demonstrations in September 2018.
