Summary: This paper presents initial results available from the European Commission Horizon 2020 5G Public Private Partnership Phase 2 project “SaT5G” (Satellite and Terrestrial Network for 5G). After describing the concept, objectives, challenges, and research pillars addressed by the SaT5G project, this paper elaborates on the selected use cases and scenarios for satellite communications positioning in the 5G usage scenario of enhanced mobile broadband.

The 5G vision embraces a broad range of applications including the connectivity in underserved and remote areas. In particular, for these applications, satellites are going to play a role in future 5G networks to provide capacity on trains, vessels, aircraft, and for base stations around the globe. In this paper, a 5G edge node concept, developed and evaluated with over-the-air tests using satellites in the geostationary orbit, is presented. The article covers a testbed demonstration study in Europe with a large-scale testbed including satellites and the latest standardization for the network architecture. The main goal of this testbed is to evaluate how satellite networks can be best integrated within the convergent 5G environment. The over-the-air tests for 5G satellite integration in this article are based on a 3GPP Release 15 core network architecture.

Satellite communication has recently been included as one of the enabling technologies for 5G backhauling, in particular for the delivery of bandwidth-demanding enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) application data in 5G. In this paper we introduce a 5G-oriented network architecture empowered by satellite communications for supporting emerging mobile video delivery, which is investigated in the EU 5GPPP Phase 2 SAT5G Project. Two complementary use cases are introduced, including (1) the use of satellite links to support offline multicasting and caching of popular video content at 5G mobile edge, and (2) real-time prefetching of DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) video segments by 5G mobile edge through satellite links. In both cases, the objective is to localize content objects close to consumers in order to achieve assured Quality of Experiences (QoE) in 5G content applications. In the latter case, in order to circumvent the large end-to-end propagation delay of satellite links, testbed based experiments have been carried out to identify specific prefetching policies to be enforced by the Multiaccess computing server (MEC) for minimizing user perceived disruption during content consumption sessions.

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