Non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) complement their terrestrial counterparts in enabling ubiquitous connectivity globally by serving unserved and/or underserved areas of the world. While supporting enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) data over NTNs has been extensively studied in the past, focus on massive machine type communication (mMTC) over NTNs is currently growing, as also witnessed by the new study and work items included into the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) agenda for commissioning specifications for Internet-of-Things (IoT) communications over NTNs. Supporting mMTC in non-terrestrial cellular IoT (C-IoT) networks requires jointly addressing the unique challenges introduced in NTNs and CIoT communications. In this paper, we tackle one such issue caused due to the extended round-trip time and increased path loss in NTNs resulting in a degraded network throughput. We propose smarter transport blocks scheduling methods that can increase the efficiency of resource utilization. We conduct end-to-end link-level simulations of C-IoT traffic over NTNs and present numerical results of the data rate gains achieved to show the performance of our proposed solutions against legacy scheduling methods.

翻译：非地面网络通过服务全球未覆盖和/或欠覆盖区域，与其地面网络互补实现普适连接。尽管过去已广泛研究在非地面网络上支持增强移动宽带数据，当前针对非地面网络上的大规模机器类通信的关注正日益增长，这从第三代合作伙伴计划议程中新增的关于非地面网络物联网通信的规范研究和工作项目可见一斑。在非地面蜂窝物联网网络中支持大规模机器类通信需要联合应对非地面网络和蜂窝物联网通信引入的独特挑战。本文针对非地面网络中由于往返时间延长和路径损耗增加导致的网络吞吐量退化问题，提出更智能的传输块调度方法以提升资源利用效率。我们开展了非地面网络蜂窝物联网流量的端到端链路级仿真，通过展示所提方案相较于传统调度方法的数据速率增益数值结果来验证其性能。