A Review on Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Wireless Networks: Challenges and Open Research Issues

Satellite-Terrestrial Integrated Network (STIN), which integrates terrestrial network systems, aerial platforms, and satellites, is recently recognized as an indispensable solution to address the new network requirements including ultra-reliable communication, massive machine type communication, seamless Internet connectivity for global ubiquitous network access and son on. Despite these benefits, the road to integrate satellite and aerial platforms in future wireless networks is not without challenges. Network architecture design, radio resource management, and edge resource management are among the main challenges in STIN networks because of a number of factors than need to be taken into account and has been attracting a lot research attention. In this paper, we provide a review on the state-of-the-art researches on STIN networks. In addition, we point out the existing research challenges and present future research issues that deserve further research investigations in STIN.