Connecting Rural Areas: an Empirical Assessment of 5G Terrestrial-LEO Satellite Multi-Connectivity

The digital transformation accomplished in recent years in the agricultural, farming, forestry, and transport industries has led to a series of emerging connectivity-based use cases that demand ubiquitous coverage. In such a scenario, Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), and their integration with Terrestrial Networks (TN), will play a key role to achieve global and seamless connectivity. This paper evaluates the current service provided by cellular terrestrial networks in rural areas and proposes and investigates a multi-connectivity solution for the use of TN and NTN to improve such service. Experimental data was gathered along a route covering more than 250 km in a rural area, using two multi-band cellular modems connected over public 5G non-standalone (NSA) cellular networks from two different operators and a SpaceX Starlink User Terminal (UT) connected to the Starlink Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite network. The multi-connectivity solution that we propose can be easily implemented, and results show that having an additional link to a satellite network avoids service degradation due to a lack of cellular coverage in up to 20 % of the route. The proposed solution also allows achieving round-trip latency targets of 100 ms with 99.99% reliability.