Realizing Intelligent Spectrum Management for Integrated Satellite and Terrestrial Networks

Nowadays both satellite and terrestrial networks are expanding rapidly to meet the ever-increasing demands for higher throughput, lower latency, and wider coverage. However, spectrum scarcity places obstacles in the sustainable development. To accommodate the expanding network within a limited spectrum, spectrum sharing is deemed as a promising candidate. Particularly, cognitive radio (CR) has been proposed in the literature to allow satellite and terrestrial networks to share their spectrum dynamically. However, the existing CR-based schemes are found to be impractical and inefficient because they neglect the difficulty in obtaining the accurate and timely environment perception in satellite communications and only focus on link-level coexistence with limited interoperability. In this paper, we propose an intelligent spectrum management framework based on software defined network (SDN) and artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, SDN transforms the heterogenous satellite and terrestrial networks into an integrated satellite and terrestrial network (ISTN) with reconfigurability and interoperability. AI is further used to make predictive environment perception and to configure the network for optimal resource allocation. Briefly, the proposed framework provides a new paradigm to integrate and exploit the spectrum of satellite and terrestrial networks.