  The International Telecommunication Union defined the requirements for 5G in
the International Mobile Telecommunications 2020 (IMT-2020) standard in 2017.
Since then, advances in technology and standardization have made the ubiquitous
deployment of 5G via satellite a practical possibility, for example, in
locations where terrestrial networks (TNs) are not available. However, it may
be difficult for satellite networks to achieve the same performance as TNs. To
address this, the IMT-2020 requirements for satellite radio interface
technology have recently been established. In this paper, these requirements
are evaluated through system simulations for the 3rd Generation Partnership
Project New Radio non-terrestrial networks with a low Earth orbit satellite.
The focus is on the throughput, area traffic capacity, and spectral efficiency
requirements. It is observed that the downlink (DL) requirements can be met for
user equipment with 2 receive antenna elements. The results also reveal that
frequency reuse factor 1 (FRF1) may outperform FRF3 in DL with a dual-antenna
setup, which is a surprising finding since FRF3 is typically considered to
outperform FRF1 due to better interference reduction. For uplink (UL), 1
transmit antenna is sufficient to meet the requirements by a relatively large
margin - a promising result given that UL is generally more demanding.
