Study of the 5G NB-IoT protocol with low density LEO Constellations of nanosatellites

The NB-IoT protocol, specified by 3GPP, is one of most popular and widely used technology for low-power wide-area (LPWA) networks. To further strengthen the potential of this technology, 3GPP is currently developing an extension of the NB-IoT protocol for non-terrestrial networks (NTN), so that terrestrial coverage could be extended using satellite-based network deployments and reach global coverage. The first part of this Master's Thesis focuses on the development of a MATLAB simulation software for the characterization of a NB-IoT NTN deployment scenario in terms of satellite coverage footprint (e.g. SNR distributions) and dynamics of the satellite link during a satellite pass (e.g. time evolution of the SNR and Doppler).Among the simulator inputs, there are the satellite height, the spherical geometry of the earth, the parameters associated with the satellite, such as orbit or speed, the transmission power, frequency, pathloss, etc... The simulator allows selecting the different inputs such as NTN parameters, link budget parameters or antenna type. These inputs, which are completely configurable, are used to obtain a set of outputs that allow to characterize the NB-IoT NTN scenario, such as the characterization of the satellite coverage footprint, the antenna pointing or the characterization of the satellite pass. For each characterization, the different parameters and results obtained, such as SNR heatmaps, Doppler frequency or propagation delay, are studied in more detail. The second part of the study is aimed at evaluating the performance of the NB-IoT NTN protocol over a satellite link. For this purpose, different numerical simulations have been performed, to estimate the minimum SNR and achievable spectral efficiency of the protocol for different communication models channels (e.g. AWGN and TDL channels, frequency offsets), different protocol configurations (e.g. number of repetitions, modulation and coding schemes) as well as considering different channel estimators. The analysis has been conducted for both downlink and uplink data channels (e.g. NPDSCH and NPUSCH). Simulations of NPDSCH Block Error Rate (BLER) and NPUSCH Block Error Rate (BLER) from the MATLAB LTE toolbox, modified and adapted to non-terrestrial communications with LEO satellites, are performed