Closing the Management Gap for Satellite-Integrated Community Networks: A Hierarchical Approach to Self-Maintenance

Community networks (CNs) have become an important paradigm for providing essential Internet connectivity in unserved and underserved areas across the world. However, an indispensable part of CNs is network management, where responsive and autonomous maintenance is much needed. With the technological advancement in telecommunications networks, a classical satellite-dependent CN is envisioned to be transformed into a satellite-integrated CN (SICN), which will embrace significant autonomy, intelligence, and scalability in network management. This article discusses the machine learning (ML)-based hierarchical approach to enabling autonomous self-maintenance for SICNs. The approach is split into the anomaly identification and anomaly mitigation phases, where the related ML methods, data collection means, deployment options, and mitigation schemes are presented. With the case study, we discuss a typical scenario using satellite and fixed connections as backhaul options and show the effectiveness and performance improvements of the proposed approach with recurrent neural network and ensemble methods.