Internet of Things over Beam-Hopping-Based Non-terrestrial Networks

Non-terrestrial networks (NTN) plays an irreplaceable role in 5G and further 6G mobile communication network to meet the growing need for global connectivity. Internet of Things (IoT) over NTN has attracted much attention to further extend the coverage for serving the mMTC use cases. In this paper, we propose a beam-hopping-based satellite system for IoT, which can support extensive coverage with fewer transmitters and offers flexibility to cope with irregular and time-variant traffic distributions. In this work, necessary adaptations for IoT in terms of beam scheduling, initial access, and data transmission are provided. Moreover, numerical analyses are conducted to show the battery life, link budget, and system capacity of the proposed system. The results shed important light on the optimal design of beam scheduling and random access resource allocation for the improvement of system capacity.