Handover Solutions for 5G Low-Earth Orbit Satellite Networks

Low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks are meant to be fundamental closing the digital divide, enabling new market opportunities and providing fifth-generation (5G) New Radio (NR) connectivity everywhere at any time. Despite advantages of LEO deployments, these systems characterized by a high mobility challenging propagation channel that compromise several procedures current 5G standards. One impacted areas is radio management, which used ensure continuous satisfactory service while users handover among cells. Current research shows measurement-based NR (HO) procedures, designed for terrestrial networks, fail optimal performance. In this work, we provide performance analysis through extensive system-level simulations state-of-the-art HO over with Earth-moving Furthermore, article presents novel antenna gain-based solution intra-satellite exploits predictability satellites movement gain beams, making user equipment (UE)’s measurements obsolete. The simulation results, consider in rural urban scenarios, show exploiting known satellite’s trajectory, UE eliminates failures undesired events, maximises time-of-stay cell experiences improved downlink signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio. This also includes sensitivity study impact on satellite-specific UE-specific errors such as UE’s location error, beam’s radiation error pointing error. Finally, analyzed.