Satellite Backhauling for Next Generation Cellular Networks: Challenges and Opportunities

Recently, studies on integration of satellitebased communication with terrestrial next-generation cellular networks (5G) have emerged in academia, standardization bodies, and industry due to extended coverage and service enrichment possibilities for mobile network operators (MNOs). In this article, we (i) first review the existing studies on satellite-based mobile network architectures and standardization efforts, (ii) propose a new satellite-based backhaul architecture for mobile communications and evaluate comparative end-to-end performance of both proposed satellite based backhaul and pure terrestrial architecture deployment scenarios through realistic experimental evaluations in terms of various key performance indicators used by MNOs, (iii) discuss encountered limitations and challenges well as the open issues of the experimented satellite-based mobile backhaul architecture, and finally (iv) provide a reference architecture and some guidelines toward designing a satellite based backhaul for next generation cellular networks from the perspective of MNOs.