NR-NTN enhancements: regenerative payloads, NTN-NTN handover

Regenerative Satellite Payloads

Rel-19 NTN enhancements evolve beyond the transparent (bent-pipe) architecture of Rel-17 to support regenerative satellite payloads. In a regenerative architecture, the satellite carries onboard gNB processing — it demodulates, decodes, and re-encodes the NR signal rather than simply amplifying and forwarding. This enables onboard scheduling, HARQ processing, and even local breakout without routing all traffic through the ground gateway. Regenerative payloads dramatically reduce round-trip latency for LEO constellations by eliminating the feeder link hop for satellite-to-satellite or…