A 5G-NR Satellite Extension for the QuaDRiGa Channel Model

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks will become an integral part of the global telecommunication infrastructure. Modeling the radio-links of these networks and their interaction with terrestrial systems is crucial for the design, planning and scaling of these networks. The 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) addressed this by providing guidelines for such a radio-channel model. However, the proposed model lacks a satellite orbit model and has some inconsistencies in the provided parameters. This is addressed in this paper. We provide a general satellite motion model that can be integrated into geometry-based stochastic channel models (GSCMs) such as the quasi deterministic radio channel generator (QuaDRiGa). We then use this model to obtain the GSCM parameters from a simplified environment model and compare the results to the 3GPP parameter set. This solves the inconsistencies, but our simplified approach does not consider many propagation effects. Future work must therefore rely on measurements or accurate ray-tracing models to obtain the parameters.