Guest editorial: Space-air-ground integrated Network with Native Intelligence (NI-SAGIN): Concept, architecture, access and networking

Ubiquitous coverage is one of the most important goals for mobile communication networks. To achieve this, integration of space, air, and ground networks is highly demanded, which expects to become the one of the enabling technologies for 6G networks. However, the integrated network faces the demand of orders of magnitude improvement in coverage, access capability and network service capability, which could not be achieved under the existing access and management mechanisms. To support this, artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied to provide technical means for solving the problems of organization and management of the space-air-ground integrated network. By virtualizing and "softwarizing" the resources of the entire network, and provisioning intelligence in the core network elements of the integrated network, the space-air-ground integrated network will be able to form native intelligence. The native intelligence will facilitate a highly autonomous network, which has the capabilities of self-adaptive scale, self-allocation resource, self-learning behaviors and self-evolution function, and is expected to meet diversified, refined and differentiated service quality requirements in the future.