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A review of technological solutions and advances in the framework of a Vertical Heterogeneous Network (VHetNet) integrating satellite, airborne and terrestrial networks is presented. The disruptive features and challenges offered by a fruitful cooperation among these segments within a ubiquitous and seamless wireless connectivity are described. The available technologies and the key research directions for achieving global wireless coverage by considering all these layers are thoroughly discussed. Emphasis is placed on the available antenna systems in satellite, airborne and ground layers by highlighting strengths and weakness and by providing some interesting trends in research. A summary of the most suitable applicative scenarios for future 6G wireless communications are finally illustrated.

Satellite Internet of Things (IoT) terminals face design constraints regarding low power consumption and light control. These constraints pose a significant collision risk when utilizing traditional random-access protocols, making it challenging to meet the system throughput requirements. Auxiliary beam schemes based on conventional beam formation suffer from the problem of the auxiliary beam shape being limited by the fixed directional map. This leads to the problem of limited throughput enhancement. In this paper, an auxiliary beam weight optimization method for satellite IoT capacity enhancement is proposed. By increasing the number of main flap roll-off bands, the success rate of collision signal separation is increased. It is possible to improve the system access performance. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method can significantly improve the system throughput performance. Furthermore, it can withstand some direction of arrival (DOA) estimation errors and amplitude–phase errors. Robustness is possessed.

Large-scale terminals’ various QoS requirements are key challenges confronting the resource allocation of Satellite Internet of Things (S-IoT). This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning-based online channel allocation and power control algorithm in an S-IoT uplink scenario. The intelligent agent determines the transmission channel and power simultaneously based on contextual information. Furthermore, the weighted normalized reward concerning success rate, power efficiency, and QoS requirement is adopted to balance the performance between increasing resource efficiency and meeting QoS requirements. Finally, a practical deployment mechanism based on transfer learning is proposed to promote onboard training efficiency and to reduce computation consumption of the training process. The simulation demonstrates that the proposed method can balance the success rate and power efficiency with QoS requirement guaranteed. For S-IoT’s normal operation condition, the proposed method can improve the power efficiency by 60.91% and 144.44% compared with GA and DRL_RA, while its power efficiency is only 4.55% lower than that of DRL-EERA. In addition, this method can be transferred and deployed to a space environment by merely 100 onboard training steps.

Nanosatellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) are an attractive platform for commercial and scientific missions, but their downlink capacity is constrained by bandwidth and by low ground station duty cycles (often under 5%). These limitations are particularly acute in heterogeneous cooperative networks, where operators seek to maximize “good-put”: the number of unique messages successfully delivered to the ground. In this paper, we present and evaluate three complementary algorithms for scheduling nanosatellite passes to maximize good-put under realistic traffic and link variability. First, a Cooperative Reception Algorithm uses Shapley value analysis from cooperative game theory to estimate each station’s marginal contribution (considering signal quality, geography, and historical transmission patterns) and prioritize the most valuable upcoming satellite passes. Second, a pair-utility optimization algorithm refines these assignments through local, pairwise comparisons of reception probabilities between neighboring stations, correcting selection biases and adapting to changing link conditions. Third, a weighted bidding algorithm, inspired by the Helium reward model, assigns a price per message and allocates passes to maximize expected rewards in non-commercial networks such as SatNOGS and TinyGS. Simulation results show that all three approaches significantly outperform conventional scheduling strategies, with the Shapley-based method providing the largest gains in good-put. Collectively, these algorithms offer a practical toolkit to improve throughput, fairness, and resilience in next-generation nanosatellite communication systems.

As the number of satellites continues to increase, satellites become an important part of the IoT and 5G/6G communications. How to deal with the data of the satellite Internet of Things is a problem worth considering and paying attention to. Due to the current on-board processing capability and the limitation of the inter-satellite communication rate, the data acquisition from the satellite has a higher delay and the data utilization rate is lower. In order to use the data generated by the satellite IoT more effectively, we propose a satellite IoT edge intelligent computing architecture. In the article, we analyze the current methods of satellite data processing, combined with the development trend of future satellites, and use the characteristics of edge computing and machine learning to describe the satellite IoT edge intelligent computing architecture. Finally, we verify that the architecture can speed up the processing of satellite data. By demonstrating the performance of different neural network models in the satellite edge intelligent computing architecture, we can find that the lightweight of neural networks can promote the development of satellite IoT edge intelligent computing architecture.

The rapid development of low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellations has not only provided global users with low-latency and unrestricted high-speed data services but also presented researchers with the challenge of understanding dynamic changes in global network behavior. Unlike geostationary satellites and terrestrial internet infrastructure, LEO satellites move at a relative velocity of 7.6 km/s, leading to frequent alterations in their connectivity status with ground stations. Given the complexity of the space environment, current research on LEO satellite internet primarily focuses on modeling and simulation. However, existing LEO satellite network simulators often overlook the global network characteristics of these systems. We present SatScope, a data-driven simulator for LEO satellite internet. SatScope consists of three main components, space segment modeling, ground segment modeling, and network simulation configuration, providing researchers with an interface to interact with these models. Utilizing both space and ground segment models, SatScope can configure various network topology models, routing algorithms, and load balancing schemes, thereby enabling the evaluation of optimization algorithms for LEO satellite communication systems. We also compare SatScope’s fidelity, lightweight design, scalability, and openness against other simulators. Based on our simulation results using SatScope, we propose two metrics—ground node IP coverage rate and the number of satellite service IPs—to assess the service performance of single-layer satellite networks. Our findings reveal that during each network handover, on average, 38.94% of nodes and 83.66% of links change.

The Farmworker Family Health Program (FWFHP) annually supports 600 farmworkers in connectivity-challenged rural areas. Traditional paper-based data collection poses validity concerns, prompting a pilot of direct data entry using tablets and satellite internet to enhance efficiency. The purpose of this article is to describe, using the TIDier checklist, a real-time, live data-entry EMR intervention made possible by satellite internet. Utilizing a customized REDCap database, direct data entry occurred through tablets and satellite internet. Patients received a unique medical record number (MRN) at the mobile health clinic, with an interprofessional team providing care. Medication data, captured in REDCap before the mobile pharmacy visit, exhibited minimal defects at 6.9% of 319 prescriptions. To enhance data collection efficiency, strategies such as limiting free text variables and pre-selecting options were employed. Adequate infrastructure, including tablets with keyboards and barcode scanners, ensured seamless data capture. Wi-Fi extenders improved connectivity in open areas, while backup paper forms were crucial during connectivity disruptions. These practices contributed to enhanced data accuracy. Real-time data entry in connectivity-limited settings is viable. Replacing paper-based methods streamlines healthcare provision, allowing timely collection of occupational and environmental health metrics. The initiative stands as a scalable model for healthcare accessibility, addressing unique challenges in vulnerable communities.

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) industry has become a research hotspot. With the advancement of satellite technology, the satellite Internet of Things is further developed along with a new generation of information technology and commercial markets. However, existing random access protocols cannot cope with the access of a large number of sensors and short burst transmissions. The current satellite Internet of Things application scenarios are divided into two categories, one has only sensor nodes and no sink nodes, and the other has sink nodes. A time-slot random access protocol based on Walsh code is proposed for the satellite Internet-of-Things scenario with sink nodes. In this paper, the load estimation algorithm is used to reduce the resource occupancy rate in the case of medium and low load, and a dynamic Walsh code slot random access protocol is proposed to select the appropriate Walsh code length and frame length h. The simulation results show that the slotted random access protocol based on Walsh code can effectively improve the throughput of the system under high load. The introduction of load estimation in the case of medium and low load can effectively reduce the resource utilization of the system, and ensure that the performance of the access protocol based on Walsh codes does not deteriorate. However, in the case of high load, a large resource overhead is still required to ensure the access performance of the system.

With the proliferation of satellite internet systems, such as Starlink and OneWeb, ground terminals have become critical for ensuring end-user connectivity. However, the security of Satellite Internet Ground Terminals (SIGTs) remains underexplored. These Linux-based embedded systems are vulnerable to advanced attacks due to limited source code access and immature protection mechanisms. This paper presents MAFUZZ, an adaptive fuzzing framework guided by neural network gradients to uncover hidden vulnerabilities in SIGT binaries. MAFUZZ uses a lightweight machine learning model to identify input bytes that influence program behavior and applies gradient-based mutation accordingly. It also integrates an adaptive Havoc mechanism to enhance path diversity. We compare MAFUZZ with NEUZZ, a neural fuzzing tool that uses program smoothing to guide mutation through a static model. Our experiments on real-world Linux binaries show that MAFUZZ improves path coverage by an average of 17.4% over NEUZZ, demonstrating its effectiveness in vulnerability discovery and its practical value for securing satellite terminal software.

After the low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite Internet has gone through the two stages of competing with the terrestrial network and supplementing the terrestrial network, it has begun to enter the third stage of constructing the satellite-ground integrated network with the terrestrial network to provide seamless global coverage. 5G New Radio (NR) is one of the core enabling technologies of the third stage of satellite Internet. This paper focuses on how to make full use of the power and bandwidth resources on the LEO satellite by using adaptive transmission scheme to maximize the throughput of the user downlink based on 5G NR. To solve the problem that the ultra-long propagation delay, outdated channel state information (CSI) and dynamic multi-scenario of LEO satellite will lead to the high implementation cost and greatly reduced performance when applied the 5G adaptive transmission scheme to LEO satellites, we optimized the adaptive transmission scheme of 5G NR based LEO satellite from multiple dimensions such as adaptive transmission process, signal to noise ratio (SNR) prediction and modulation and coding scheme (MCS) adaptive switching strategy. The simulation results show that compared with the fixed threshold switching strategy based adaptive transmission scheme, the proposed scheme can improve the average throughput of the system by 26.6% under the dynamic multi-scenario environment served by the LEO satellite.