In this issue of IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, we are pleased to present a special issue on “Service-Oriented Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks” with a collection of 10 articles. We are also very glad to present 11 articles accepted from open calls.

Afrustrating aspect of spectrum policy is the fact that in virtually every band one looks at, in most locations one finds spectrum that appears to be underutilized. (Admittedly this is complicated by the fact that there is no general consensus on how to quantify spectrum utilization.) There are many reasons for this apparent underutilization, including uneven terrain and nonuniform spatial distribution

With the skyrocketing number of connected devices and dramatic growth in data traffic, terrestrial networks alone cannot meet the massive and global connectivity needs in an effective and efficient manner. It is envisioned that airborne and space communication infrastructures, such as low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), will be integrated with terrestrial

The satellite tracking, telemetry, and command system, or TT&C, is utilized to transmit the telemetry and telecommand data, as well as to determine the satellite orbit. It is the lifeline of a satellite, and thus its safety and reliability are of fundamental importance to the satellite. After years of development, the traditional satellite TT&C technologies are relatively mature, while there are still

The integrated communication system has received increasing attention to establish a fully connected world in the eras of beyond fifth generation wireless communication and sixth generation wireless communication systems, where a wide range of services with distinct requirements needs to be accommodated, covering distinct scenarios such as terrestrial, ocean, outer space, and underwater. In this article

Modern Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is often designed to support geographically disperse nodes in large quantities. Satellites have unparalleled superiority in terms of coverage, making themselves ideal candidates as wide area IIoT access points. Antenna arrays (AAs) empower the satellites with beamforming capability, a key feature to accommodate various technical challenges of IIoT. In this

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been extensively investigated as an enabling technology for improving our daily life. With increasing demands for seamless connectivity, the space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) is expected to provide reliable communications for IoT devices anywhere and anytime. Since IoT devices have sparse activity and low signaling overhead, random access can be an efficient

Space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs) provide global information sharing, large-scale coverage, and ubiquitous collaboration architecture, and alleviate the pressure of rapid traffic growth on terrestrial wireless networks. On the other hand, the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in all walks of life has attracted significant attention on intelligent services. However, frequent

With its potential versatility and reliability, the space-air-ground integrated vehicular network (SAGVN) is envisioned as a promising solution to deliver quality vehicular services anywhere at any time. This article proposes a software defined framework for SAGVN to achieve flexible, reliable, and scalable network resource management. First, key applications and research challenges in resource management

The rapid growth of maritime transportation and its regularization have imposed an increasing demand for developing a global maritime surveillance capacity. The existing cooperative maritime traffic monitoring relies on the shipborne automatic identification system (AIS), which is now confronting severe security threats due to the vulnerabilities of AIS at both the implementation and protocol levesl

In this article, we justify an online service provisioning (OSP) framework to provision virtualized and micro service (VMS) to users, which can achieve efficient, flexible, and scalable service provisioning. Compared to the onboard service provisioning framework, the system bottleneck shifts from the onboard computation limitation to the network capability and robustness in OSP, which the space-air-ground

Space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs) allow mobile nodes to gain access to the Internet anywhere and at any time, which has significantly broadened the communication coverage all over the world. Different from other heterogeneous networks, SAGINs have the characteristics of dynamic network and wide coverage, which make it vulnerable to various malicious attacks. To improve the security of SAGINs

A space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) provides comprehensive interconnection and quality of service. Such an integrated network poses security concerns by bringing together a variety of devices from different untrusted authorities. Blockchain, as a decentralized ledger, although showing great potential to solve the security issues in SAGIN, may bring up intolerable latency by sequentially validating

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The twelve articles in this special issue focus on spectrum and energy efficiency in wireless communications.

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Wireless Communications and Networking has experienced a tremendous growth over the past few years, due to the increased demand of the new wireless services and applications. The fifth generation (5G) is being deployed and the sixth generation (6G) is expected to offer higher data rates, ubiquitous coverage, scalability, lower latency and massive densification. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) has witnessed

Spectrum-prediction-based dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has been considered as a promising approach to meet the higher spectral efficiency, more system throughput, and better network connectivity requirements of 5G Internet of Things (IoT) applications. This article discusses the feasibility of applying spectrum prediction in 5G followed by proposing a 5G architecture supporting the spectrum-prediction-based

Since the early days of wireless communication, wireless spectrum has been allocated according to a static frequency plan, whereby most of the spectrum is licensed for exclusive use by specific services or radio technologies. While some spectrum bands are overcrowded, many other bands are heavily underutilized. As a result, there is a shortage of available spectrum to deploy emerging technologies that

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are two key techniques for enabling massive connectivity in future wireless networks. A massive MIMO-NOMA system can deliver remarkable spectral improvements and low communication latency. Nevertheless, the uncontrollable stochastic behavior of the wireless channels can still degrade its performance. In this context

A wireless body area network (WBAN) is a physical network system with functions such as information collection and data transmission, and provides a key means for real-time health detection and medical services. However, if WBANs deployed in a dense environment lack internetwork coordination, it can cause high interference. In addition, WBANs have the characteristics of social mobility, and regular

Efficient transmit and receive beam management is necessary in millimeter-wave spectrum due to the inherently directional nature of antenna array transmissions in this regime. Energy efficiency of beam sweeping is further complicated when operating in shared or unlicensed spectrum, since receiving nodes are unaware if their designated transmitter has actually gained access to the medium. This article

Compared to terrestrial and airborne wireless communications using radio waves, underwater wireless communications encounter a longstanding challenge: the aqueous-medium seriously attenuates electromagnetic waves. As the only choice to this day, underwater wireless communication employing acoustic waves is still hindered by hydrophone device performance. Several shortcomings, such as the unsatisfactory

With the proliferation of versatile devices and data-consuming services, the quest for spectrum efficiency has led to the merging of three disruptive technologies: millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, massive MIMO (maMIMO), and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). Emerging wireless networks move toward ultra-dense deployment of massive devices with diverse service demands, which call for efficient

The potential of a system combining millimeter- wave (mmWave) communication and multiple- input multiple-output (MIMO) technology has motivated an extensive effort in both the research community and industry. With the much higher spectrum band, mmWave is considered to be a promising technology to solve the congestion problem in the sub-6 GHz band for future massive Internet of Things (IoT) systems

Although spectrum sensing is commonly used in modern wireless communications to determine spectrum resources, the rapid development of wireless communications has generated massive heterogeneous spectrum data, which has dramatically increased the complexity of spectrum sensing. Machine-learning-assisted spectrum sensing, as an emerging and promising technique, provides an effective way to find available

Big data streams are available across the growing heterogeneous wireless sensor networks, with characteristics of vast volume and dynamic transmission. Energy efficiency improvement in big data stream gathering is becoming a challenge. In this article, a self-adaptive gathering algorithm for multisource heterogeneous big data streams with sliding windows is proposed, which can improve the energy efficiency

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) boost the development of the Internet of Things by their ability to monitor environments and flexibility. It is desirable to study an efficient configuration of a WSN that balances its energy consumption and its functionality. In this article, we propose to formulate the sensor deployment task as a combinatorial optimization problem and introduce an effective sensor

Aiming to provide more efficient and robust physical layer security strategies for wireless communications, this article investigates the endogenous security of end-to-end learning of communication by addressing two main security issues of communication: confidential transmission and user authentication. For confidential transmission, we have redesigned the loss function of the autoencoder-based deep

Dense small satellite networks (DSSN) in low earth orbits (LEO) can benefit several mobile terrestrial communication systems (MTCS). However, the potential benefits can only be achieved through careful consideration of DSSN infrastructure and identification of suitable DSSN technologies. In this paper, we discuss several components of DSSN infrastructure including satellite formations, orbital paths

A new wave of wireless services, including virtual reality, autonomous driving and Internet of Things, is driving the design of new generations of wireless systems to deliver ultra-high data rates, massive numbers of connections and ultra-low latency. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the critical underlying technologies that allow future wireless networks to meet these service

In the upcoming era of 5G, the number of base stations, edge computing nodes and data centers is believed to be three to five times more than that of 4G. Serious challenges on the deployment and operation of 5G networks and services arise, especially on how to build and maintain battery energy storage systems for sustainable 5G power feeding at low cost for all scenarios. Although battery has long

Route planning is considered as one of the fundamental technologies in the navigation system, which finds an optimal route between a pair of source and target locations. Navigation services are required to provide real-time responses to route planning queries to promote user experiences on the road under different situations, such as sudden detour, unpredictable traffic congestion and loss of GPS signals

With the advancements in real-time applications, age of information (AoI) emerges to describe the freshness of data. Here, we investigate AoI performance metric in simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) enabled cooperative wireless communication system. We use two SWIPT protocols: time-switching (TS) and power- splitting (PS) at the relay node and compute the AoI performance.

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5G wireless technology is expected to provide much improved performance in terms of data rate, reliability, latency, and mobility in various use cases and deployment scenarios. One of these promising 5G deployment scenarios is the high speed train scenario, which aims to offer broadband access to passengers on a high speed train running up to 500 km/h. Such very high mobility imposes considerable technical

Internet of things (IoT) in smart city consists of a diversity of public utility and vertical industry services with extremely different performance requirements. As a key technology of 5G networks, network slicing (NS) is featured to provide distinct virtual networks and differentiated QoS guarantees in a shared infrastructure. Therefore, it becomes necessary to employ intelligent NS management for

Fifth generation (5G) mobile systems are expected to be integrated with different radio access methods such as satellite components to provide seamless connectivity and ubiquitous coverage for users worldwide. In this article, we first provide a brief review of current initiatives and system architecture for the convergence of satellite and 5G networks. Then, we investigate various approaches to improve

We present a blockchain radio access network (B-RAN) as an advanced wireless access paradigm. The proposed B-RAN unites massive trustless subnetworks to form a large-scale trustworthy cooperative network by leveraging the blockchain principle. We introduce the economic concept of network effects with respect to the benefit of a growing B-RAN. We show that B-RAN can create and capture values by connecting

In the Solar Insecticidal Lamps Internet of Things (SIL-loTs), when migratory insects with phototactic feature are attracted by the Solar Insecticidal Lamp (SIL) and collide with its metal mesh, the mesh releases high voltage pulse discharge. However, direct assessment of the interference from the above-generated strong electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to ZigBee-based device has not been feasible until

Nowadays, network users' demands for low latency services and individual data security grow rapidly. In this article, we conceive a new communication network architecture based on the concept of intelligent agents. The proposed intelligent agent serves as a virtual secretary of the corresponding user to request desired service from Internet companies or neighboring agents, which can reduce Internet

Current fifth generation (5G) cellular networks mainly focus on the terrestrial scenario. Due to the difficulty of deploying communications infrastructure on the ocean, the performance of existing maritime communication networks (MCNs) is far behind 5G. This problem can be solved by using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as agile aerial platforms to enable on-demand maritime coverage, as a supplement

Future air-ground integrated vehicular network (AGVN) is a vital part of the expected ubiquitous communication system. The resources in AGVN are geographically separated and are often heterogeneous. Therefore, distributed management and cooperative management are key issues in a multi-tier based topology of AGVN. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) shows advantages in facilitating the management

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have emerged as a key enabler for beyond fifth-generation (B5G) communication technology and for realizing sixth-generation (6G) cellular communication. In addition, B5G and 6G networks are expected to support aerial user communications in accordance with the expanded requirements of data transmission for an aerial user. However, there are challenges in providing

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5G will greatly promote the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. AI technology will also empower and intelligentize 5G, build capabilities of intelligent networks, help 5G overcome various challenges in its development, and provide better services for vertical industries and mass market customers with different requirements. 5G intelligent networks are expected to have the new architectures

The five articles in this special section focus on novel research contributions, demonstration results, and standardization efforts on 5G network security, privacy and trust. Currently it is expected that the generation (5G) wireless systems will soon provide rich ubiquitous communication infrastructure with wide a range of high-quality services. It is foreseen that 5G communications will offer significantly

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to provide ubiquitous wireless machine-type communication devices and extensive information collection, resulting in an unprecedented amount of privacy and secrets exposed to the radio space. Security issues become a major restriction on the further development of IoT. However, secure transmissions in IoT are challenged by low complexity limitation and massive

The development of 5G presents regulators with several security-related challenges. Implementation of a security framework that would be capable of addressing all concerns of users and, by extension, of governments, is one of them. In March 2019, the European Commission presented a plan to achieve, throughout the European Union, a concerted response to security concerns related to 5G networks. This

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Federated learning (FL) has recently been proposed as an emerging paradigm to build machine learning models using distributed training datasets that are locally stored and maintained on different devices in 5G networks while providing privacy preservation for participants. In FL, the central aggregator accumulates local updates uploaded by participants to update a global model. However, there are two

Cognitive cyber physical systems (CCPSs) are integrated closed-loop solutions with cyber and physical components that are empowered with cognitive properties. The security of these highly capable CCPSs is a critical issue that needs to be addressed collaboratively with the quality of service constraints and the associated transmission costs. In this article, we highlight the properties of CCPSs, address

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as enablers for supporting many applications and services, such as precision agriculture, search and rescue, temporary network deployment or coverage extension, and security. UAVs are being considered for integration into emerging 5G networks as aerial users or network support nodes. We propose to leverage UAVs in 5G to assist in the prevention, detection