On the Use of NB-IoT over GEO Satellite Systems with Time-Packed Optical Feeder Links for Over-the-Air Firmware/Software Updates of Machine-Type Terminals

The verticals of 5G, such as the automotive, smart grid, and smart cities sectors, will bring new sensors and IoT devices requiring Internet connectivity. Most of these machine-type terminals will be sparsely distributed, covering a very large geographical area and, from time to time, will have to update their software, firmware, and/or other relevant data. Given this situation, one viable solution to implement the “Over-the-Air” update of these IoT terminals can be done with the aid of GEO satellite systems. However, due to the ultra-dense radio frequency reuse factor that contemporary High-Throughput Satellite (HTS) systems implement in the access link to serve the IoT terminals, the use of a time-packed Free Space Optical (FSO) link represents a practical solution to avoid the bottleneck that the satellite gateway experiences in the feeder link. The performance of both Detect-and-Forward and Decode-and-Forward relaying strategies are studied, assuming that the single-carrier M-PAM symbols that are transmitted on the optical feeder link are mapped into M-QAM symbols that modulate the multiple sub-carriers of the OFDM-based radio access link. In addition, the benefits of encapsulating the NB-IoT frames into DVB-S2(X) satellite frames is also analyzed in detail. The effects of the impairments introduced in both the optical feeder and radio access links are characterized in detail, and the end-to-end error correction capabilities of the Modulation and Coding Schemes (MCS) defined in the contemporary releases of the NB-IoT and DVB-S2(X) standards are studied for different working regimes.