Integrating Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks to Bridge the Digital Divide and Advance Sustainability

This paper analyzes the key characteristics of the integration among Terrestrial Networks (TN) and Non Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) that could have an important role to eliminate the digital divide and to make environments more sustainable. This is due to the many NTN devices, consisting of both high-altitude elements as satellites GEO and LEO, and lower-altitude elements as drones and aerial platforms, that allow us to reach unserved areas and have a fine control of any ambient. However, managing, orchestrating, and controlling for TN-NTN networks requires sophisticated procedures, and here we consider the main recommendations coming from organizations as 3GPP and ETSI, including also approaches based on Artificial Intelligence, necessary to define a suitable network behavior with so many elements.