Sustainable Satellite Communications in the 6G Era: A European View for Multilayer Systems and Space Safety

Abstract

During the New Space era small countries are becoming important players in the space business. While space activities are rapidly increasing globally, it is important to make operations in a sustainable and safe way in order to preserve satellite services for future generations. Unfortunately, the sustainability aspect has been largely overlooked in the existing surveys on space technologies. As a result, in this survey paper, we discuss the multi-layer networking approaches in the 6G era specifically from the sustainability perspective. Moreover, our comprehensive survey includes aspects of some interesting industrial, proprietary, and standardization views. We review the most important regulations and international guidelines and revisit a three-dimensional architecture vision to support the sustainability target for a variety of application areas. We then classify and discuss space safety paradigms that are important sustainability enablers of future satellite communications. These include space traffic management, debris detection, environmental impacts, spectrum sharing, and cyber security aspects. The paper also discusses advances towards a planned European connectivity constellation that could become a third flagship infrastructure along with the Galileo and Copernicus systems. Finally, we define potential research directions into the 2030s.INDEX TERMS Aerospace engineering, Low earth orbit satellites, Radio spectrum management, Spaceborne radar

Situational Awareness for Industry 5.0 and Mobile Robotics: A Review

“…Satellite communications is a way to share SitAw data even when the terrestrial infrastructure does not exist or is destroyed. So called non-terrestrial networks that cover not only satellites but also high altitude platforms are used actively in different crisis areas but also to support all mobile platforms at sea, on land or in the air, including aircrafts, ships and trains, while requiring minimal terrestrial infrastructure for support [53]- [55].…”

“…Situational awareness system for a dynamic 3D environment is a research direction that needs to be tackled in the future. There are visions on how to use space, airborne and terrestrial platforms together to support positioning and connectivity needs everywhere [55], [92]. Same is true for multi-dimensional remote sensing.…”

Drivers, use-cases, key indicators, and requirements for satellite-based machine-type connectivity and IoT

“…The satellite systems that can provide truly global and equal wireless connectivity across the continents are a good candidate to tackle this challenge and have the potential to become an essential part of the future connectivity ecosystem, providing both broadband and machine-type connectivity. The three areas contributing toward sustainable satellite communications beyond the 5G era were identified in [6], depicted in Fig. 1, and elaborated on next.…”

QoE-Aware Cost-Minimizing Bandwidth Renting for Satellite-as-a-Service enabled Multiple-Beam SATCOM Systems

“…The growing attention on satellite communication systems for service-aware transmission and seamless coverage, and the associated spending for it, has been inspiring a number of big names in the industry to develop new "satellite-as-aservices" (SaaS) business platforms [3], [4]. This novel paradigm can enable IPs to access new markets and it can release SPs from investing a huge amount of money in order to build dedicated satellites [5]. Such a model comprises infrastructure providers (IPs) -the owners of the SATCOM systems, and the service providers (SPs), which may rent flexible RF bandwidth from the IPs to provide different services to their end users [1], [3], [6], [7].…”

“…When renting the network resources from the IPs and allocating them to provide communication services to customers, the SPs have to cope with several challenges to maximize their profit [5], [12], [13]. Their business problems include (but are not limited to) capacity dimensioning to meet the irregular and unpredictable time-varying data traffic generated by heterogeneous apps/services, as well as managing the rented resource efficiently in both peak and off-peak periods to minimize expenses [14].…”