Civil Aircrafts Augmented Space-Air-Ground-Integrated Vehicular Networks: Motivation, Breakthrough, and Challenges

In order to meet mobile users' unprecedented communication demands and the goal of global seamless communication, space-air-ground-integrated networks (SAGINs) have attracted lots of attention in recent years. The existing works related on air segment mainly discussed unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), airships, and balloons near the space. However, they neglected many other valuable resources, such as civil aircrafts (CAs). Moreover, communication problems for remote areas and emergency scenarios (such as disasters and hot-spot areas) have not been solved thoroughly. Motivated by these facts, we introduce CAs to enhance the current SAGIN and present a novel architecture called 'CAs augmented space-air-ground-integrated vehicular networks' (CAA-SAGIVNs). The proposed network architecture makes breakthrough in three main aspects: 1) a normal network architecture; 2) collaboration with multiple sky access platforms (SAPs); and 3) service-oriented fair allocation. Although CAA-SAGIVN can bring out many benefits, it also faces more challenges due to its high mobility and cross-layer characteristics. Therefore, we provide an exhaustive review of state-of-the-art works on modeling, mobility management, solutions of service-oriented allocation in SAGIN. On the basis of the preliminary investigation and discussion, some open issues are identified as possible future research directions.