Bachelor Thesis
Dominic Richter
2026II
Abstract
The standardization of 3GPP Release 17 Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) enables standardized Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) devices to communicate directly with satellite constellations, theoretically addressing the 85% global cellular coverage gap. However, treating these high-latency, power-constrained satellite links as direct equivalents to terrestrial networks introduces significant system inefficiencies. This thesis presents a comprehensive empirical end-to-end performance analysis comparing terrestrial NB-IoT with geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) NB-NTN using commercial off-the-shelf hardware. The research systematically evaluates protocol efficiency, power consumption, antenna polarization, and mobility impacts to establish validated performance baselines for hybrid IoT architectures.
Extensive field measurements reveal that the increased latency of GEO NTN significantly degrades connection-oriented protocols. For example, TCP generated 147% protocol overhead and experienced frequent timeouts, whereas the Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) operating over UDP achieved reliable transmission with no packet loss observed in the evaluated scenarios.
Power profiling further demonstrates substantial energy overheads for satellite connectivity: while attaching to the NTN link consumes approximately the same energy as a suboptimal terrestrial attach, NTN message transmissions require more than 10 times the power of terrestrial NB-IoT transmissions. These characteristics necessitate optimization techniques such as payload compression or reduced messaging frequency.
Furthermore, environmental evaluations reveal that standard meteorological conditions, including rain and cloud cover, have no measurable impact on NTN performance. However, dynamic mobility campaigns expose a critical hardware trade-off in antenna architecture. While specialized circularly polarized antennas improve the link budget under line-of-sight conditions, they exhibit reduced reliability in reflection-heavy environments such as urban areas due to the physical phenomenon of polarization reversal. In such multipath scenarios, standard linearly polarized antennas demonstrate greater robustness and functional reliability.
Overall, this research concludes that GEO NB-NTN represents a viable connectivity option for globally deployable low-power telemetry systems. By leveraging connectionless application protocols, minimizing payload sizes, and utilizing context-aware antenna configurations, IoT device manufacturers can effectively harness standardized satellite connectivity for global data acquisition on battery-powered devices.