Intelligent interference management and secure communications for satellite-terrestrial integrated systems

Satellite-terrestrial integrated (STI) systems represent the right solution to meet complex requirements of several services and sharing of the limited spectral resources between satellite systems and terrestrial ones must be considered to optimize performance. Network architectures and traffic demand are different for the satellite component and for the terrestrial 5G/6G one, so that the requirements of spectral resources for satellite and terrestrial systems are expected to vary dynamically in a significant range. Then, over the overlapped coverage area of satellite and terrestrial systems inter-system interference may arise but also jamming, which affects every wireless system (either terrestrial or satellite), is an issue. For this reason, it is necessary to define suitable interference and self-interference models and to evaluate the impact of interference on the system capacity. Moreover, safety, security and reliability represent particularly serious issues in the depicted scenario due to its intrinsic complexity. Definitively, it is of paramount important to exploit deep research activities on spectrum management, spectrum sensing, spectrum access and spectrum sharing and then to share the outcomes. Last but not least, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play an important role in space-air-ground integrated networks, having been applied in many fields (target search, regional patrol, signal detection) for its advantages in terms of high efficiency, low cost and flexibility but improvements are desirable in terms of deployment, flight trajectory planning and security.