Near-Space Communications: The Last Piece of 6G Space-Air-Ground-Sea Integrated Network Puzzle

This article presents a comprehensive study on the emerging near-space communications (NS-COM) within the context of space-air-ground-sea integrated network (SAGSIN). Specifically, we firstly explore the recent technical developments of NS-COM, followed by the discussions about motivations behind integrating NS-COM into SAGSIN. To further demonstrate the necessity of NS-COM, a comparative analysis between the NS-COM network and other counterparts in SAGSIN is conducted, covering aspects of deployment, coverage and channel characteristics. Afterwards, the technical aspects of NS-COM, including channel modeling, random access, channel estimation, array-based beam management and joint network optimization, are examined in detail. Furthermore, we explore the potential applications of NS-COM, such as structural expansion in SAGSIN communications, remote and urgent communications, weather monitoring and carbon neutrality. Finally, some promising research avenues are identified, including near-space-ground direct links, reconfigurable multiple input multiple output (MIMO) array, federated learning assisted NS-COM, maritime communication and free space optical (FSO) communication. Overall, this paper highlights that the NS-COM plays an indispensable role in the SAGSIN puzzle, providing substantial performance and coverage enhancement to the traditional SAGSIN architecture.

Sensing User's Channel and Location with Terahertz Extra-Large Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface under Hybrid-Field Beam Squint Effect

This paper investigates the sensing of user's uplink channel and location in terahertz extra-large reconfigurable intelligent surface (XL-RIS) systems, where the unique hybrid far-near field effect and the beam squint effect caused by the XL array aperture as well as the XL bandwidth are overcome. Specifically, we first propose a joint channel and location sensing scheme, which consists of a location-assisted generalized multiple measurement vector orthogonal matching pursuit (LA-GMMV-OMP) algorithm for channel estimation (CE) and a complete dictionary based localization (CDL) scheme, where a frequency selective polar-domain redundant dictionary is proposed to overcome the hybrid field beam squint effect. The CE module outputs coarse on-grid angle estimation (respectively observed from the BS and RIS) to the localization module, which returns the fine off-grid angle estimation to improve CE. Particularly, with RIS, CDL can obtain user's location via line intersection, and a polar-domain gradient descent (PGD) algorithm at the base station is proposed to achieve the off-grid angle estimation with super-resolution accuracy. Additionally, to further reduce the sensing overhead, we propose a partial dictionary-based localization scheme, which is decoupled from CE, where RIS is served as an anchor to lock the user on the hyperbola according to time difference of arrival and the user's off-grid location can be obtained by using the proposed PGD algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the two proposed localization schemes and the proposed CE scheme over state-of-the-art baseline approaches.