Call for Papers

The Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) satellite constellations in the 90s (such Iridium and Globalstar), although representing a major technical breakthrough, were not able to achieve the initial goal of complementing the second generation mobile terrestrial network due to the GSM ad other standards rapid worldwide adoption. However, the decline of conventional linear television and the persisting need to mitigate the digital divide gap still affecting billion of people recently generated a renewed interest by private investors for LEO satellite megaconstellations.  The megaconstellations under deployment can provide broadband access anywhere, anytime leveraging on the low-cost series production of small satellites and more affordable launch solutions.

At the end of the last decade, key industrial players realized the potential complementary role satellites can play to extend the 5G terrestrial networks coverage over low-density populated areas, oceans etc… This has been triggering the inclusion of a Non Terrestrial Network (NTN) component in the latest 5G 3GPP standard releases. Yet, there are many technological challengers remain for ensuring that both quality and cost of the NTN services is comparable to the terrestrial counterpart.  This is mainly due to the constraints in satellite payload power, mass and antenna size. This comes in addition to the stringent power flux density limitations on ground in particular in the below 6 GHz satellite bands. The required order of magnitude effective delivered throughput increase and service cost reduction can only be achieved by a mix of system architectures and innovative technologies for both the space and ground segment.

Space communication system and technologies will also play a key role for human return to the Moon planned for mid-2020, for preparing human exploration of Mars in the more distant future and further cosmic exploration. As missions voyage further from Earth, it is important to consider how we can continue to reliably communicate with them and how they will accurately navigate through space when they are so far from home.

This Special Issue will provide a comprehensive presentation of the state-of-the-art findings including technology, theory, design, optimization, and applications of space communication, potentially shaping future evolutions of 5G and beyond, and manned and unmanned space exploration.

Original technical contributions are solicited in the relevant areas including, but not limited to, the following:

• Constellation design aspects for Near-Earth and Lunar communications
• Scalable, flexible yet high performance payloads architectures and technologies able to cope with 5G and beyond requirements
• Optical space-to-space and space-to-ground communications
• Pragmatic (Massive)-MIMO and intra/inter-system interference mitigation techniques
• Radio resource management aspects for uneven traffic distributions in NTN networks
• Transport and Routing protocols
• Distributed Machine Learning over satellites
• Deep Space networks
• Delay tolerant networks
• Interplanetary Internet

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should submit their manuscripts following the IEEE JSAC guidelines. Authors should submit a PDF version of their complete manuscript to EDAS.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission: 30 July 2023 (Deadline Extended)
First Notification: 30 October 2023
Acceptance Notification: 15 December 2023
Final Manuscript Submission: 30 December 2023
Publication Date: Second Quarter 2024

Guest Editors

Riccardo De Gaudenzi
European Space Agency, Netherlands

Bjorn Ottersten
University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Ana Perez
Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), Spain

Halim Yanikomeroglu
Carleton University, Canada

Thomas Heyn
Fraunhofer IIS, Germany

Jason W. Mitchell
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), USA

Stephen M. Lichten
California Institute of Technology, USA