5G Aerial Component for IoT Support in Remote Rural Areas

There is today a renewed interest in satellite communications. It is expected that many new systems will be operative in a short time. They will become part of the aerial component of 5G, also including high-altitude balloons and drones for focused coverages. The interest of this paper is to investigate a satellite 5G scenario for massive Machine Type communication (mMTC), where an intermediate layer of drones is used for collecting sensors data. We study an application where sensors are deployed in large rural (remote) areas for the timely detection of fire alarms (even if other types of measurements and alarms are possible). In this scenario, no terrestrial Internet connectivity is available so that drones are used to collect data from sensors and connect to a control station via satellite. A system architecture has been proposed and an analytical model has been adopted to characterize the mean delay to notify alarms from the field to the control center. This model takes shadowing and collisions effects into account. This study has been validated by means of simulations.