The traditional ground industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) cannot supply wireless interconnections anywhere due to its small-scale communication coverage. In this article, a multibeam satellite IIoT in Ka-band is proposed to realize wide-area coverage and long-distance transmissions, which uses nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for each beam to improve transmission rate. To guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) for the satellite IIoT, the beam power is optimized to match the theoretical transmission rate with the service rate. The NOMA transmission rate for each beam is maximized by optimizing the power allocation proportion of each node subject to the constraints of the total power for the beam and the minimal transmission rate for each node within the beam. Satellite-ground integrated IIoT is proposed to use the ground cellular network to supplement the satellite coverage in the blocked areas. The power allocation and network selection for the integrated IIoT are proposed to decrease the transmission cost. Simulation results are provided to validate the superiority of employing NOMA in the satellite IIoT and show higher transmission performance for the QoS-guarantee resource allocation.

QoS-Guarantee Resource Allocation for Multibeam Satellite Industrial Internet of Things With NOMA

Research and processing development on satellite communications has strongly re-emerged in recent years. Following the prosperity of various wireless services provided by satellite communications, the security issue has raised growing concerns since the space information network is susceptible to be eavesdropped by illegal adversaries in such a large-scale wireless network. Recently, the physical-layer security (PLS) has emerged as an alternative security paradigm that explores the randomness of the wireless channel to achieve confidentiality and authentication. The success story of the PLS technique now spans a decade and thrives to provide a layer of defense in satellite communications. With this position, a comprehensive survey of satellite communications is conducted in this article with an emphasis on PLS. We first briefly introduce essential background and the view of the satellite Internet of Things (IoT), as well as discuss related research challenges faced by the emerging integrated network architecture. Then, we revisit the most popular satellite channel model influenced by many factors and list the commonly used secrecy performance metrics. Also, we provide an exhaustive review of state-of-the-art research activity on PLS in satellite communications, which we categorize by different architectures including land mobile satellite communication networks, hybrid satellite-terrestrial relay networks, and satellite-terrestrial integrated networks. In addition, a number of open research problems are identified as possible future research directions.

Physical-Layer Security in Space Information Networks: A Survey

Space-air-ground-sea integrated network (SAGSIN), which integrates satellite communication networks, aerial networks, terrestrial networks, and marine communication networks, has been widely envisioned as a promising network architecture for 6G. In consideration of its cooperation characteristics of multi-layer networks, open communication environment, and time-varying topologies, SAGSIN faces many unprecedented security challenges, and there have been a number of researches related to SAGSIN security performed over the past few years. Based on such observation, we provide in this paper a detailed survey of recent progress and ongoing research works on SAGSIN security in the aspects of security threats, attack methodologies, and defense countermeasures. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present the state-of-the-art of security for SAGSIN, since existing surveys focused either on a certain segment or on several segments of the integrated network, and little can be found on the full coverage network. In addition to reviewing existing works on SAGSIN security, we also present some discussions on cross-layer attacks and security countermeasure in SAGSIN, and identify new challenges ahead and future research directions. 

A Survey on Space-Air-Ground-Sea Integrated Network Security in 6G

With rapid advances in satellite technology, space information network (SIN) has been proposed to meet the increasing demands of ubiquitous mobile communication due to its advantages in providing extensive access services. However, due to satellites’ resource constraint and SIN’s highly dynamic topology, it poses a challenge on management and resource utilization in the development of SIN. There have been some works integrating the software defined network (SDN) into SIN, defined as software defined space information network (SD-SIN), so as to simplify the management and improve resource utilization in SIN. However, these works ignore the security issue in SD-SIN. Meanwhile, the existing security mechanisms in SDN are still unable to cope with the uniqueness of satellite network, and some other critical security issues still haven’t yet been well addressed. In this paper, based on $(t,n)$ secret sharing, an SIN-specific lightweight group key agreement protocol is proposed for SD-SIN to ensure both the security and applicability. Moreover, considering the highly dynamic network topology, we also design a group key-based secure handover authentication scheme to reduce the overhead of handover authentication. Security analysis shows that the handover authentication protocol can resist to various known attacks. In addition, further performance evaluation shows its efficiency in terms of computation and communication overheads. Finally, the simulation results of computing overhead to the network entities demonstrate that our protocol is feasible in practical implementation.

A Lightweight and Secure Group Key Based Handover Authentication Protocol for the Software-Defined Space Information Network

With the increasing global communication demands and the development of Internet of Things (IoT), extending the connectivity to rural and remote areas has become imperative for future networks. The sixth-generation (6G) network is expected to provide heterogeneous services and seamless network coverage for everyone and everything. Combining the advantages of both satellite and terrestrial networks, the integrated satellite-terrestrial network architecture is promising to provide global broadband access for all types of users, which has drawn much attention from both the academia and industry. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art of integrated satellite-terrestrial networks toward 6G. First, an executive classification and summary of the integration architecture is presented from network design to performance optimization. Then, typical applications of the integrated satellite-terrestrial network are discussed based on the architecture. By considering the unique characteristics of the two networks, main challenges are pointed out when performing integration, such as the long propagation delay, complex link conditions, and high dynamics of the network topology. Finally, some promising future techniques are explored from the perspective of the integrated architecture. A detailed survey of the potential integration architectures is of great importance to enable more flexible network design and construction in future 6G networks. This article will provide a valuable guideline on future research and development of integrated satellite-terrestrial networks. 

Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks Toward 6G: Architectures, Applications, and Challenges

Space information network (SIN) makes it possible for any object to be connected to the Internet anywhere, even in the areas with extreme conditions, where a cellular network is not easy to deploy. Access authentication is the key to secure users’ access control in SIN, mainly to prevent illegal adversaries from getting access to SIN services. However, the highly complicated communication environment of SIN (e.g., exposed links, higher signal delay, etc.) poses a challenging issue in the design of a secure and efficient authentication scheme. Although some authentication schemes have been proposed for SIN, they are unsuitable for Internet of Things (IoT) in SIN due to the high signaling overhead and insufficient security properties. Therefore, in this paper, we design a provably secure and efficient authentication protocol, along with an efficient handover mechanism, for IoT in SIN. In our design, we introduce a new authentication system model, where the satellites are given the ability to authenticate users to avoid the online involvement of the network control center (NCC) when authenticating users, thereby reducing long authentication delay and avoiding a single point of bottleneck in NCC. Furthermore, the support of batch verification in our design can significantly enhance handover efficiency when a group of users switch to another satellite. Our further analysis shows that our scheme is secure against various attacks and can meet a variety of security requirements. In addition, performance evaluation shows the superiority of our scheme on both delay and handover efficiency compared with existing schemes.

A Secure and Efficient Access and Handover Authentication Protocol for Internet of Things in Space Information Networks

With an advancement of mobile communication technology, the space information network (SIN) has been proposed to meet the increasing demands of mobile communication due to its advantage of providing great expanding access services. In SIN, authentication is significant for the security to prevent the network resource from unauthorized access. However, the features of highly exposed links and extremely high propagation delay make it difficult to design a secure and fast authentication scheme for SIN. Although some existing researches have tried to design authentication protocols for SIN, they haven't taken the intolerable authentication delay and the risk of satellite compromising into consideration. Faced with these problems, we design a proxy signature-based authentication scheme for SIN, in which, the interaction process of authentication can be only implemented between the mobile user and the satellite node, thus reducing the long authentication implementation delay. Furthermore, we utilize the proxy signature to mitigate the risk of satellites being attacked. The results of security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme can provide the required security and largely reduce the authentication latency.

Low-Latency Authentication Against Satellite Compromising for Space Information Network

The invention discloses a low-delay anonymous access authentication method for an air-ground integrated space information network. According to the method, the legitimacy of users can be effectively judged, the illegal access of illegal users to network resources can be avoided, and the security of the air-ground integrated network can be effectively ensured; and according to the scheme of the invention, an authentication function is transferred to a satellite, the delay that the users access the network can be greatly reduced, and meanwhile, by adopting temporary identities of the users, theanonymous authentication of the users can be achieved, the privacy of the users can be protected, and on the basis of protecting the privacy, real identities of malicious users can be exposed, and theresponsibility of the malicious users can be investigated.

Wei Meng

Papers

A Secure and Efficient Access and Handover Authentication Protocol for Internet of Things in Space Information Networks

A Lightweight and Secure Group Key Based Handover Authentication Protocol for the Software-Defined Space Information Network

Low-Latency Authentication Against Satellite Compromising for Space Information Network

Low-delay anonymous access authentication method for air-ground integrated space information network