From ground to space: towards an integrated management of terrestrial and non terrestrial networks

This paper analyzes the key characteristics of Non Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) which consist of both high-altitude elements as satellites GEO and LEO, and lower-altitude elements as drones and aerial platforms. These elements integrate with Terrestrial Networks (TNs) to create a 3D environment. Managing, orchestrating, and controlling this integrated network requires sophisticated procedures. This complexity primarily stems from the dynamic nature of NTN elements which requires continuous variations of the communication links that could cause strong fluctuations in terms of Quality of Service and overall several troubles with the handover. The paper presents the vision of the Italian ITA-NTN project, detailing all these architectural and dynamical aspects and introducing some guidelines for the management and control of the whole TN-NTN infrastructure considering the main recommendations for cross-domain coming from organizations as 3GPP and ETSI, including also approaches based on Artificial Intelligence, necessary to understand a network behavior with so many elements.