Call for Papers

With the skyrocketing number of connected devices and dramatic growth in data traffic, massive and global connectivity is highly required. Moreover, a wide range of services/use cases with distinct requirements needs to be accommodated, such as broadband access, smart transportation, smart city, maritime surveillance, and disaster rescue. With these pressing demands, terrestrial networks alone cannot meet the needs in an effective and efficient manner. It is envisioned that terrestrial networks, airborne and space communication infrastructures, such as low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), will be integrated to provision more comprehensive and three-dimensional network connectivity, anywhere and anytime. As the fundamental information infrastructure, space-air-ground integrated networks (SAGINs) will also provision ubiquitous communication, computation, and caching, to achieve high data rate, low latency, and high reliability.

Various services/use cases have different quality of service (QoS) requirements in terms of latency, reliability, throughput, security, and so on. To accommodate different services, SAGINs need to exploit the respective advantages of each segment in terms of coverage, flexibility, reliability and availability. It is well known that each segment has its own advantages and limitations, e.g., satellite networks provide larger coverage while the latency is longer; terrestrial networks can achieve shorter latency but with the potential issue of coverage. Moreover, the cost incurred to use caching and computing resources will grow as the altitude increases. Therefore, achieving service-oriented networking in SAGINs is fundamentally important to meet the requirements of different services efficiently, taking into account the pros and cons of each segment. However, it is very challenging due to the following reasons. First, efficient integration of different segments is difficult, considering the scale and complexity of the system. Second, multi-dimensional heterogeneity in resources and distinct quality of service requirements pose great challenges to network management and operation. Last but not least, the system should be adaptive to the high spatial-temporal dynamics in traffic loads, topology, and resource availability, due to mobility and time-varying environments.

This Special Issue (SI) solicits original articles discussing the principles and innovations of network integration, orchestration of computing and communication, multi-dimensional computing offloading, information-centric networking, and security for SAGINs. Authors are invited to submit manuscripts on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Software defined SAGIN
• Next-generation SAGIN architecture
• QoS aware resource management in SAGIN
• Cooperative computing in SAGIN
• Information-centric networking in SAGIN
• Cooperative communication for SAGIN
• Dynamic access control for SAGIN
• Mobility management and service migration
• Orchestration of computing, caching and communications
• Artificial intelligence in SAGIN
• Big data analysis for SAGIN
• Security and privacy in SAGIN

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Paper Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select “December 2020: Service-Oriented Space-Air-Ground Integrated Networks” topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 March 2020
Initial Decision: 1 June 2020
Revised Manuscript Due: 1 July 2020
Final Decision: 1 August 2020
Final Manuscript Due: 1 September 2020
Publication Date: December 2020

Guest Editors

Ju Ren
Central South University, China

Ning Zhang
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, USA

Yue Gao
Queen Mary University of London, UK

Ye Wang
Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), China

James Kimery
National Instruments, USA

Muhammad Ismail
Tennessee Tech University, USA