LEO IoT Satellite

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The trial was conducted in one of Aramco's remote sites located in the Ain Dar area. The trial aims to demonstrate the potential use of Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites for IoT coverage for remote area.

The schematic diagram of the trial is illustrated in Figure 1, where the field sensor data is interconnected to an OQ TECH terminal through Bluetooth before forwarding the sensed data to the corresponding satellite. The trial setup can be categorized into two main segments, namely Ground and Space, where both can be summarized as follow:

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Fig.1. The schematic diagram of the trail.

Ground Segment

  • Use case defined together with Aramco and meant to represent data/parameters that could be vital importance to Aramco operations:
    • Temperature/Humidity
    • CO2
  • One OQ TECH terminal interconnected through Bluetooth to sensors and natively support GPS positioning.
  • Terminal gathering temperature/humidity/CO2/GPS reading every 2 hours and storing until next satellite pass.
  • Very large beamwidth to allow connection for virtually any elevations.
  • No need for accurate pointing, the terminal is just laid on any surface and is ready to transmit.

Space Segment

  • The data is transmitted to a satellite, namely Tiger-2, at 525 km altitude and 97.5 degrees inclination, using NB-IoT technology.
  • The satellite is passing over the area twice a day.
  • The satellite elevation angles ranges, typically, from 20 to 70 degrees, as shown in Fig. 3.
  • Data is transmitted to satellite when it passes over the site.
  • Data stored in satellite until it comes in visibility of the next ground station.
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Fig.3. The satellite elevation angles towards Ain Dar area.

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Fig.2. Trial setup: Terminal and sensors.

The readings were collected every 2 hours from the sensors where the transmitted packet contains of the following:

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Temperature

2 bytes

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Humidity

2 bytes

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CO2

2 bytes

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GPS

8 bytes

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Timestamp

4 bytes

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Measurement index

1 bytes

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Status code

1 bytes

Trail results

An ultra-high reliability connection was achieved as all the transmitted data frames were successfully received and decoded at the ground station. The decoded data were then transmitted to the cloud-based dashboard that shown in Fig. 4. Additionally, a date throughput of 9.6 Kbps and an overall latency of 10 millisecond (ms) were attained, respectively. In conclusion, our successful trial has demonstrated that, the LEO-aided 5G -IoT satellite can be used to provide coverage to remote areas in harsh environments.

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Fig.4. The dashboard for data representations.