Motivation & Challenges

Need for new solutions to connect millions of IoT devices worldwide.

The IoT concept emerged in the 2000s and increased during the last decade. Currently, we are experiencing the deployment of the first IoT applications on a large scale.

We foresee that this trend will continue in the coming years. However, much more development and research are needed to cope with the forecasted billions of interconnected devices merged into the Internet in the next decade.

Due to the massiveness of the network, current wireless technologies (e.g., LoRaWAN, Cellular-IoT, ZigBee, WiFi, BLE) need to be revised to attend to such demand, even more so concerning energy efficiency and network scalability.

This challenge is especially crucial for the areas with low population and infrastructure density. Remember that oceans cover a significant share of the Earth’s surface, where static infrastructure deployment is exceptionally challenging.

Even though it is reasonable to expect lower IoT device density in these regions than in urban environments, where connectivity is well established today, a significant number of new applications and services must be deployed in the future to tackle sustainable development goals.

Integrating terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks is a challenging task!

The idea of interconnecting mobile and satellite networks gained much interest from both Industry and Academia during the past decade, particularly in the cases of coverage extension and backhauling in remote areas. The work has focused chiefly on complementing terrestrial services.

This idea has been recently renewed and expanded for seamless IoT integration of mobile and satellite networks. A notable example is directly connecting IoT devices through satellites (direct-to-satellite (DtS)).

In addition, the industry (e.g., Iridium, Sateliot, OneWeb, Lacuna Space, and Starlink, to name a few) is continually developing new services to support IoT. Simultaneously, the work on standardization (such as the work actively ongoing within the 3GPP and LoRa alliance) of the DtS is now emerging.

Some visions suggest that DtS will become integral to the 6th generation (6G) mobile systems. However, given the novelty of the targeted field and the challenging requirements (e.g., the unprecedented mobility of the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, the colossal communication link distances, and the lack of possibility of servicing the satellites after launch), the integration of IoT and satellite, especially in the context of DtS approach, imposes development of new architectures and technical solutions. The IoT devices’ requirements and traffic patterns differ from conventional satellite terminals today.

Another substantial challenge that hampers innovation is the need for more experts in this novel field and the lack of relevant textbooks to educate such experts.