The rapid growth of non-terrestrial communication necessitates its integration with existing terrestrial networks, as highlighted in 3GPP Releases 16 and 17. This paper analyses the concept of functional splits in 3D-Networks. To manage this complex structure effectively, the adoption of a Radio Access Network (RAN) architecture with Functional Split (FS) offers advantages in flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency. RAN achieves this by disaggregating functionalities into three separate units. Analogous to the terrestrial network approach, 3GPP is extending this concept to non-terrestrial platforms as well. This work presents a general analysis of the requested Fronthaul (FH) data rate on feeder link between a non-terrestrial platform and the ground-station. Each split option is a trade-of between FH data rate and the respected complexity. Since flying nodes face more limitations regarding power consumption and complexity on board in comparison to terrestrial ones, we are investigating the split options between lower and higher physical layer.

翻译：非地面通信的快速增长需要将其与现有地面网络相融合，正如3GPP第16版和第17版所强调的。本文分析了三维网络中功能切分的概念。为有效管理这一复杂结构，采用具有功能切分的无线接入网架构在灵活性、可扩展性和成本效益方面具有优势。RAN通过将功能解耦为三个独立单元实现这一目标。与地面网络方法类似，3GPP正在将这一概念扩展到非地面平台。本研究对非地面平台与地面站之间馈线链路所需的前传数据速率进行了总体分析。每种切分方案都是前传数据速率与相应复杂度之间的权衡。由于飞行节点在功耗和机载复杂度方面比地面节点面临更多限制，我们重点研究了物理层中较低层级与较高层级之间的切分方案。