Satellite Systems in the Era of 5G Internet of Things

In recent years, IoT applications have drawn a great deal of attention, both in academia and industry. A crucial requirement of any infrastructure serving the IoT market will be to guarantee ubiquitous connectivity to the low-cost, low-powered devices distributed all over the globe. It is widely accepted that this requirement will not be met by the terrestrial network alone. There will be, in fact, vast areas of the globe where the terrestrial infrastructure deployment will be unfeasible or not economically viable, thus leaving those areas un- or under-served. For this reason, several studies and projects are addressing the use of a Non-Terrestrial Network component to seamlessly complement and extend the terrestrial network coverage in future systems. The design of these extremely complex systems requires manifold analyses at different levels of abstraction, from satellite constellation and ground segment architecture aspects, to the evaluation of the air interface behaviour, in order to evaluate the system performance. The aim of this work is to perform a detailed analysis of the SatCom system aspects, trying to be as accurate as possible but without getting lost in unnecessary details, in order to provide a comprehensive set of tools, organised in a simulation platform, to support the design and performance evaluation of the system. Notably, simulation softwares play an important role in this framework; however, a full-featured simulation tool does not yet exist for the evaluation of the described emerging technologies. ESA M2M Simulator (ESiM2M) is a System-Level Simulator, developed in collaboration with the European Space Agency, which is intended for closing this gap, as a tool for the design and analysis, from a system-level point of view, of Satellite-IoT systems. This work is primarily focused on the description of the ESiM2M simulation tool and the results derived with the latter from analyses on Satellite-IoT systems.