Challenges, opportunities, and solutions for converged satellite and terrestrial networks

The current trend in telecommunications services provisioning is shifting toward global ubiquitous networking and unified service architecture. Given the diversity of access technologies, this global ubiquitous networking cannot be possible without efficient interworking between the different access players. This leads to the necessity of defining, implementing, and deploying common services control architecture, able to support a wide variety of services for users in a variety of roles (consumer, producer, or manager of communication and media). This article defines some issues related to the interworking operation between the satellite and terrestrial domains. It suggests some solutions and discusses their potential.