Evaluation of New Radio Beam Management Framework for LEO Satellites

This work reviews the beam management framework of New Radio, identifies the challenges to be addressed for a proper operation in non-terrestrial network and numerically evaluates its suitability for satellite beam selection, satellite tracking and satellite acquisition in the case of LEO constellations. It reveals that satellite beam selection and satellite tracking can be performed efficiently, while acquisition times are in the range of a few to tenths of seconds, in the case that no GNSS and ephemeris information is exploited, as considered in future 3GPP releases towards 6G. These delays may be acceptable for a pure initial acquisition, but new solutions are needed for efficient satellite handovers or idle mode operation.