Space and Terrestrial Integrated Networks: Emerging Research Advances, Prospects, and Challenges

The articles in this special section focus on space and terrestrial integrated networks. Currently, many aerial platforms, satellite systems, and space and terrestrial integrated networks (STINs) have been developed, while some of them are still under construction. The basic idea of STIN is to simply connect heterogeneous devices, systems, and networks via the Internet, thus providing much more effective services than traditional infrastructures. Through effective acquisition, coordination, transmission, and aggregation of multi-dimensional information, the resource planning, task distribution, and action management of STIN can be realized. The goal is to provide all kinds of users a real-time and reliable communication infrastructure by conducting efficient collaboration. However, there are still many open issues that need to be solved. For example, signal distortion and fading in the network connections in the atmosphere often occur. Therefore, the design of STIN typically needs to take into account signal distortion and fading, multiple access interference, large latency, and so on. At present, the development of STIN has reached a crossroad. Radio resource management, transparent handover, network management, wireless communication, and other promising technologies (e.g., long-term evolution, software-defined networking [SDN], and device-to-device communication [D2D]) are critical research trends for such hybrid satellite-aerial-terrestrial networks.