Towards a Connected Heterogeneous All-Medium Integrated Network (CHAIN) for Converged Connectivity Across Land, Sea, Air, and Space

📅 2026-09-12
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
论文提出CHAIN框架,通过全光网络骨干和AI驱动的跨域控制层整合海陆空天各领域通信,解决下一代连接中的跨介质问题。
📝 Abstract
Next-generation connectivity depends on data traversing multiple physical media within a single end-to-end path, yet research in optical fibre, free-space optical and radio wireless, non-terrestrial networks, and underwater communications has advanced largely in isolation. This fragmentation has a wider adverse impact on communication performance, deployment and adaption as the most demanding open problems in next-generation connectivity, cross-medium channel characterisation, transport-layer protocol design across heterogeneous latency regimes, and cross-domain orchestration, sit at the boundaries between domains and can only be addressed by bringing these challenges together in cross-domain systems. Space-air-ground integrated network research has begun to treat three domains analytically, and its recent extension to the sea surface represents the most ambitious multi-domain framework proposed to date, yet neither has produced experimental results, a deployed system, or a standards engagement. The subsurface and maritime domain remains absent from both. This paper proposes the connected heterogeneous all-medium integrated network (CHAIN), a framework that treats the undersea, maritime, terrestrial, aerial and space domains as a single design space. We identify an all-photonic network backbone as the unifying physical infrastructure, Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven orchestration as the cross-domain control layer, and the joints between domains as a unification challenge. We survey the state of the art across all domains and the existing cross-domain literature, develop the CHAIN framework and its technical pillars, characterise the five core open problems the field must resolve, and set out a research roadmap from near-term measurement campaigns and testbed validation through cross-medium field trials to global-scale deployment.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

next-generation connectivity
cross-medium channel characterisation
transport-layer protocol design
cross-domain orchestration
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

all-photonic network backbone
AI-driven orchestration
cross-domain control layer
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