Thanks to the spectacular advances in signal processing and nanotechnology, five wireless generations have been conceived over tha past five decades. Indeed, near-capacity operation at an infinitesimally low error-rate has become feasible and flawless multimedia communications is supported in areas of high traffic-density, but how do we fill the huge coverage holes existing across the globe?
As a promising system-architecture, an integrated terrestrial, UAV-aided, airplane-assisted as well as satellite-based global coverage-solution will be highlighted to pave the way for seamless next-generation service provision. However, these links exhibit strongly heterogeneous properties, hence requiring different enabling techniques.
The joint optimization of the associated conflicting performance metrics of throughput, transmit power, latency, error probability, hand-over probability and link-lifetime poses an extremely challenging problem. Explicitly, sophisticated multi-component system optimization is required for finding the Pareto-front of all optimal solutions, where none of the above-mentioned metric can be improved with- out degrading at least one of the others.