Sep 2026· IEEE Internet of Things Journal· Vol 13, pp. 39826-39839· 0 citations· 44 references
Abstract
Space–air–ground integrated networks (SAGINs) break through the coverage and capacity limitations of terrestrial networks, providing seamless, high-bandwidth, and highly reliable communication services in remote areas. For end-to-end transmission in the Internet of Things (IoT), the store-and-forward architecture transmits data packets in a best-effort way, resulting in unpredictable latency. The exclusive occupation of links by flows leads to a significant drop in resource utilization. To satisfy deterministic end-to-end communication, this article proposes a quality-of-service (QoS)-aware end-to-end transmission architecture for SAGINs. It comprises two core types of links: access links assisted by high-altitude platforms (HAPs) and backhaul links built around the low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite. End-to-end flows will be allocated time slots and transmitted hop-by-hop within a single frame to meet deterministic QoS requirements. In this architecture, an optimization problem is designed to maximize the number of successfully scheduled flows with different QoS requirements. To solve the non-deterministic polynomial hard (NP-hard) mixed-integer nonlinear program in dynamic scheduling scenarios, a joint access and transmission heuristic algorithm is proposed. Specifically, to ensure efficient transmission and improve resource utilization, concurrent end-to-end flows are first processed with conflict filtering, followed by hop-by-hop scheduling with the priority based on the least number of required time slots. The simulation results show that, compared to other baseline schemes, the proposed scheme achieves a significant improvement in scheduling performance.
Covert communication has emerged as a promising technique for protecting wireless transmissions by concealing the existence of legitimate communication from malicious wardens. However, achieving end-to-end covert communication in space–air–ground integrated networks (SAGINs) is challenging due to the coupled effects of satellite-to-ground relay access, ground multi-hop forwarding, and cooperative jamming. In this paper, we propose an incentive-aware end-to-end covert routing framework for SAGINs, where a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite delivers information to a ground destination through a selected relay base station and a self-organizing ground route. We first establish a two-stage SAGIN model and characterize the satellite-to-ground covert capacity under satellite sidelobe interference, as well as the ground-route covert performance in the presence of multiple wardens and cooperative jammers. Since jammers are self-interested and incur power costs when generating artificial interference, we design an incentive mechanism to stimulate cooperative jamming for enhancing ground-route covertness. Specifically, the reward allocation and jamming-power response are jointly derived by considering both the route-dependent covertness gain and the power cost of jammers. Based on the resulting route-dependent utility, the ground routing problem is further transformed into a shortest-weighted path-finding problem. To improve the long-term stability of satellite-to-ground relay access, we model the repeated interaction between the LEO satellite transmitter and the satellite warden as a base-station selection process and develop a zero-determinant strategy to stabilize the long-term expected utility relation under different warden monitoring policies. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively balances satellite-to-ground covert capacity and ground-route utility, outperforms baseline relay selection schemes, and achieves stable long-term covert routing performance against uncertain warden behaviors.
Zhao Deng, Mingze Li, Nannan Sun et al.· Italian National Conference...· 0 citations
6G targets ultra-wide coverage together with ultra-low-latency and ultra-reliable services. To this end, Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks (SAGINs), which integrate non-terrestrial networks (NTNs) with terrestrial networks (TNs), have emerged as a key candidate architecture. However, legacy resource management methods designed for terrestrial systems are difficult to apply directly due to high mobility and long propagation delays (and Doppler effects) of satellite/aerial platforms, dynamic topologies, and constrained onboard resources. In addition, under short-packet transmission (finite blocklength) regimes, QoS analysis must go beyond average-rate metrics and explicitly ensure latency and reliability simultaneously. This paper surveys resource management for SAGIN/TN-NTN integration through a three-axis taxonomy: (i) resource allocation/scheduling, (ii) mobility/dynamics, and (iii) statistical multi-QoS (latency-reliability) modeling. We compare representative works spanning optimization, graph deep reinforcement learning (Graph DRL), and finite-blocklength-based analyses. We also summarize virtualization/slicing and security/robustness as cross-cutting constraints, and highlight open research challenges.
Minjae Go, Woongsoo Na· International Conference on...· 0 citations
The evolution of sixth-generation (6G) networks increasingly necessitates seamless and on-demand coverage across heterogeneous environments, particularly maritime regions where traditional terrestrial infrastructure is limited. In this paper, we aim to enhance the quality of service (QoS) for maritime users in the 6G space-air-sea integrated networks (SASINs). To shed light on the design of SASIN, we consider a communication model consisting of a single satellite, a single decode-and-forward (DF) uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) relay, and multiple maritime users. A novel on-demand coverage performance metric, service efficiency, is proposed to evaluate the QoS of maritime users. Particularly, in order to explore the boundary performance of the proposed architecture, both uplink and downlink communications are analyzed under the assumption of perfect channel state information (CSI). Furthermore, we formulate optimization problems to maximize the service efficiency for both uplink and downlink transmissions, subject to the user scheduling and decoding order, beamforming design, and placement of the relay UAV, respectively. To address the uplink optimization problems, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm that integrates a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP)-based user scheduling algorithm with a successive convex approximation (SCA)-based UAV placement strategy to obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution. Analogously, for the downlink optimization problem, we develop an AO algorithm that combines a low-complexity greedy user scheduling scheme based on an initial beamforming design with the joint optimization of UAV placement and beamforming, effectively balancing performance and computational efficiency. Finally, extensive numerical results demonstrate that the proposed schemes achieve near-optimal performance with significantly reduced complexity, offering a strong solution for high-efficiency SASIN in future 6G maritime communications.
Yingqi He, Jinpeng Xu, Lin Zhou et al.· IEEE Transactions on Wireles...· 0 citations
The proposed framework separates network control from forwarding, maintains a global view of vehicular network state, classifies V2X flows by service criticality, and dynamically selects routes and bandwidth allocations using delay, congestion, handover, and priority constraints.
Swadhin Singh, Swatantra Kumar, Mr. Rahul Kumar· International Journal of Adv...· 0 citations
Direct-to-satellite narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a prominent use case in non-terrestrial network (NTN) communications, rapidly approaching commercialization. The scalability of these systems relies heavily on the access procedures implemented by user equipments. While standardized access protocols perform well in terrestrial networks, their efficiency in NTN environments supporting massive machine-type communications remains uncertain. In this work, we analyze the latest access procedure features introduced in the 3GPP standard for IoT-NTN, specifically contention-based early data transmission (CB-EDT) in Release-19. We compare the solution with legacy procedures to assess its potential for future deployments. The results highlight substantial advantages when implementing CB-EDT in terms of energy savings, access completion time, and spectral efficiency, making it an optimal candidate for future massive IoT satellite deployments.
Estefanía Recayte, Sergio Aguilar, Andrea Munari et al.· International Mediterranean...· 0 citations
An improved strict-priority Deficit Round-Robin (SP-DRR) scheduling strategy is proposed and incorporates it into a unified moment generating function (MGF) analytical framework, referred to as SP-DRR-MGF, for probabilistic E2E delay analysis in 5G–TSN networks.
Xiaohuan Zhang, Jiancheng Qin, Yiqin Lu et al.· PeerJ Computer Science· 0 citations