UAV-Satellite Networks: A Brief Overview

The integration of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and satellite technologies is expected to play a critical role in the 6G wide-area communication infrastructure. This infras-tructure can be used to advance applications in diverse sectors like disaster response, remote sensing, environmental monitoring, agriculture, and border surveillance. The performance of UAV-satellite networks in these applications can vary significantly based on the optimization method employed. Thus, to provide in-sights into the development of innovative optimization techniques and to fully leverage the advantages of UAV-satellite networks, this paper explores the network's architecture, current research trends, and challenges.