Research Projects

India's PURA, or Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas, is a crucial need for poverty removal. Despite significant progress in 4G and 5G deployments, about 45.8% of the Indian population still lacks digital connectivity. Ultra-high-density satellite networks, such as OneWeb and Starlink, provide higher bandwidth in most human-inhabited regions, but they won't solve India's rural and semi-urban population's partial cellular and satellite connectivity. The proposal proposes research to develop architectures and protocols for integrating terrestrial 6G networks with emerging ultra-high-density satellite networks, Low-tier High Altitude Platforms (HAPs), High-tier HAPs, traditional Wireless LANs, and Wireless Mesh Networks. The project faces significant technical challenges due to the diversity of networks involved and the stringent performance requirements of 6G networks. The focus will be on architectures for integrating 6G terrestrial networks and ultra-high density satellite networks, protocols for integrating ultra-dense satellite networks with 6G terrestrial networks, artificial intelligence-driven resource management for integrated 6G-satellite networks, and Software-Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization for integrated 6G-satellite networks. A future network testbed will be developed for experiments to achieve the project's goals.