5G-Nanosatellite – Integrated 5G UE for 3U CubeSat In-Orbit Demonstrator

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

ESA & Industry

Role: Principal Investigator (PI)
Funding: European Space Agency (ESA ARTES IC) + Altice Labs (Portugal) · €542,000 (2024–2028)
Official Page: uni.lu/snt-en/research-projects/5g-nanosatellite/

Executive Summary

5G-Nanosatellite designs, integrates, and validates a 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) User Equipment (UE) software-defined radio payload based on a reconfigurable Xilinx RFSoC fitted into a 3U LEO CubeSat form factor for live in-orbit demonstration of direct satellite-to-ground connectivity.

Key Objectives & Technical Setup

Reconfigurable CubeSat 5G-NR UE Payload: Full Doppler pre-compensation ($\pm 40\text{ kHz}$) and dynamic Timing Advance adaptation for LEO passes.
COTS & SDR Benchmarking: Validated in the 6GSPACE Lab against OpenAirInterface gNBs and commercial 5G-NTN test terminals (Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 / Pi 4B equipped with Waveshare Quectel RM520N-GL 5G HATs and sysmoISIM-SJA2 programmable USIM cards).

Project Details

Funding Agency: European Space Agency (ESA ARTES IC) & Altice Labs (Portugal)
Budget: €542,000
Duration: 2024 – 2028
Role: Principal Investigator (PI)

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Altice Labs | Dr. Jorge Querol

5G-Nanosatellite – Integrated 5G UE for 3U CubeSat In-Orbit Demonstrator

Executive Summary

Key Objectives & Technical Setup

Project Details