WIP: An Open-Source Tool for Evaluating System-Level Performance of NB-IoT Non-Terrestrial Networks

Satellite Communication is expected to play a leading role in 5G & Beyond networks. Current studies, however, focus the attention on physical and link-level aspects, while ignoring to evaluate system-level performance. This paper presents a novel simulation tool, conceived as a new module for the open-source 5G-air-simulator, modeling NB-IoT satellite-based communication systems. Specifically, it implements several link-to-system abstraction models, the cell selection procedure, and a configurable satellite constellation. Furthermore, these essential features are successfully integrated within the rest of the 5G-air-simulator, thus offering the opportunity to test flexible network deployments (e.g., by varying the number and the distribution of users) under different application statistics. To demonstrate the actual effectiveness of the developed tool, this work also presents a preliminary performance assessment of an NB-IoT satellite-based communication system enabling reference monitoring scenarios.