Multi-connectivity solutions for rural areas: Integrating terrestrial 5G and satellite networks to support innovative IoT use cases

Reliable communications and wide-area coverage are essential factors for innovative applications in rural and remote regions, such as microclimate monitoring, remote operational support, early pest detection, and real-time tracking of livestock transport. However, rural areas often face challenging connectivity conditions due to the
lack of terrestrial network (TN) infrastructure, e.g., 5G network technology. While 5G cellular networks are now a reality and promise to improve key performance indicators (KPIs), such as Gbps data rates and latencies in the order of milliseconds, these are typically limited to urban scenarios. To address the rural coverage issue, non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) such as satellite-based solutions, have been introduced to provide coverage in remote regions. Therefore, a multi-connectivity approach can be integrated to simultaneously serve an end-user by merging satellite and cellular links in a joint approach. This study empirically explores the availability of TN (5G) and NTN (satellite) communications in rural areas to develop innovative IoT use cases and applications. It also discusses the possibility of integrating multiple network interfaces through multi-connectivity techniques to improve communication availability and reliability, allowing for the operation of more demanding applications. The results obtained demonstrate that a traditional single-connectivity approach may not be sufficient to provide service to rural environments due to the KPIs requirements given several use cases within these rural areas. TN single-connectivity suffers from constant service outage due to poor infrastructure deployment, while NTN singleconnectivity has larger latency and uplink constraint, both limiting the deployment of applications requiring connectivity in rural areas. The multi-connectivity strategy, which jointly integrates 5G and satellite networks, meets the network availability requirements for latency (< 100 ms), downlink throughput (> 30 Mbps), and uplink throughput (> 20 Mbps) KPIs at least 98%, 99%, and 95% of the time, respectively. Therefore, multi-connectivity solutions enable several use cases, such as precision agriculture, livestock monitoring, and forest management, which are unfeasible with traditional single-connectivity approaches.