End-to-end management of hybrid terrestrial and satellite

Find out what changes management systems need to address in order to coordinate terrestrial and satellite networks within a single operational model

By incorporating satellite capabilities, operators can provide coverage in rural areas and in maritime or airborne environments, and maintain communications when an emergency affects terrestrial networks.

The challenge lies in coordinating the terrestrial and satellite domains, which operate differently. Latency, mobility, availability, spectrum management, and capacity allocation do not follow the same parameters in a terrestrial network as in a satellite network. In addition, the systems used to monitor and operate them have, until now, been developed separately. Managing them as a single network requires action on several fronts:

• Define end-to-end services that take into account common coverage, availability, mobility, and quality requirements.

• Share KPIs, metrics, and operating policies to assess the performance of both environments using comparable criteria.

• Adopt standardized interfaces and common information models that facilitate communication between systems through open standards and APIs.

• Integrate the OSS and BSS systems of the different domains to coordinate available resources and automate operational decisions.

A shared orchestration layer will give operators a unified view of the service, regardless of the infrastructure used in each segment. It will help correlate incidents across domains, identify root causes, and allocate resources based on available capacity, network status, and each service’s needs.

The aim is to manage terrestrial and satellite networks under shared operational criteria. This coordination will help automate management tasks, improve incident response, and enable more predictive operations while maintaining service quality as network conditions evolve.