Non-Terrestrial Networks: Link Budget Analysis

Satellite Communication systems represent a solid solution to extend and complement terrestrial networks in un-/under-served areas. The recent standardisation endeavours within 3GPP led to the Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) study item for New Radio, aimed at deploying satellite systems either stand-alone or as integration to terrestrial networks in mobile broadband and machine-type communication scenarios. In this context, the main focus is currently related to: i) evaluating the system level performance; and ii) understanding the impact at link level of typical satellite channel impairments on the PHY/MAC procedures. In this paper, we focus on the former; in particular, we provide: i) a detailed discussion on the current system architecture and assumptions; ii) we thoroughly describe the methodology to perform link budget computations; and iii) we show the numerical results for GEO and LEO systems.