Special Issue on Resilient and Intelligent Communications in Non-Terrestrial Networks
Published 17 April, 2026
The rapid evolution of Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) is reshaping global communication infrastructures by enabling ubiquitous connectivity, resilient service provisioning, and intelligent network operation across space, aerial, and terrestrial segments. However, NTN deployments operate under fundamentally different conditions compared to terrestrial networks. The broadcast nature of satellite and aerial links, long and time-varying propagation delays, high mobility with rapidly evolving topologies, and stringent onboard constraints in power, computation, and payload collectively introduce unique challenges. These factors redefine both system performance limits and the threat landscape, giving rise to critical issues in reliability, security, and intelligent resource management that cannot be effectively addressed by conventional terrestrial-centric designs.
Recent advances in communication and intelligent technologies, including agentic artificial intelligence, digital twins, covert communications, fluid antenna systems, affine frequency division multiplexing, and rate-splitting multiple access, offer promising tools to address these challenges. These techniques enable intelligent beamforming and access control, data-driven channel and traffic prediction, learning-assisted resource allocation, and integrated sensing and communication tailored to dynamic non-terrestrial environments. Nevertheless, the joint design of resilience, intelligence, and security in NTNs remains largely underexplored, particularly in developing lightweight and trustworthy AI for onboard decision-making, robust multi-access and interference management under high mobility, and adaptive defense mechanisms against intelligent adversaries.
This Special Issue invites high-quality contributions that establish new system-level visions, theoretical foundations, and enabling technologies for resilient and intelligent communications in NTNs, with a focus on interdisciplinary research spanning signal processing, wireless communications, and artificial intelligence.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Advanced waveform design for resilient communications in NTNs
- Hardware-impairment-aware communications in NTNs
- Rate-splitting multiple access for NTNs
- Affine frequency division multiplexing for NTNs
- Intelligent transceiver design for NTNs
- Intelligent beamforming and precoding for NTNs
- Mobility management and handover optimization in NTNs
- Semantic communications in NTNs
- Physical-layer security techniques for NTNs
- Privacy-preserving transmission protocols for NTNs
- Resilient multiple access schemes for NTNs
- Covert communications in NTNs
- Integrated covert communication and sensing in NTNs
- Intelligent reconfigurable surfaces for NTNs
- Intelligent fluid antenna systems for reliable NTNs
- Digital twins for resilient NTN operation
- Finite blocklength transmission in NTNs
- Resilient computational offloading in NTNs
- Privacy-preserving distributed computing in NTNs
- Trustworthy AI and large model training for NTNs
- Meteor burst communications
- AI-RAN-driven resilient communications for NTNs
Timeline:
Submission deadline: October 30, 2026
Acceptance deadline: December 30, 2026
Expected publication date: March 30, 2027
Guest editors:
Zan Li
Professor, Xidian University, China
Email: zanli@xidian.edu.cn
Dr. Zan Li received the B.S. degree in communications engineering and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in communication and information systems from Xidian University, Xian, China, in 1998, 2001, and 2006, respectively. Since 2001, she has been a Faculty Member of the School of Telecommunication Engineering, Xidian University, China, where she is currently a Vice President of Xidian University and a Full Professor with the State Key Laboratory of ISN. Her current research focuses on wireless communication and signal processing, particularly covert communication, weak signal detection, spectrum sensing, and cooperative communication. She was a recipient of China Young Women Scientists Award, China Youth Science & Technology Award, and XPLORER PRIZE. She was awarded as a Distinguished Young Researcher from NSFC and a Changjiang Scholar from the Ministry of Education, China, respectively. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), the China Institute of Electronics (CIE), and the China Institute of Communications (CIC). She serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COGNITIVE COMMUNICATIONS AND NETWORKING and CHINA COMMUNICATIONS.
Xianhao Chen
Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong, China
Email: xcheneee@hku.hk
Dr. Xianhao Chen received the B.E. degree in electronic information from Southwest Jiaotong University in 2017, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida in 2022. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, China, where he directs the Wireless Information & Intelligence (WILL) Lab. He serves on the technical program committees of flagship international conferences, including ACM MobiHoc, IEEE GLOBECOM, and IEEE ICC, and on the editorial boards of ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE Transactions on Networking, and IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. He received the Early Career Award from the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong in 2024, the ECE Graduate Excellence Award for research from the University of Florida in 2022, and the ICCC Best Paper Award in 2023. His research interests include wireless networking, edge intelligence, and machine learning.
Shengyu Zhang
Professor, Xidian University, China
Email: zhangshengyu@xidian.edu.cn
Dr. Shengyu Zhang received the B.E. and M.E. degrees from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 2016 and 2019, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, in 2023. He was a Research Fellow with the Singapore University of Technology and Design. Since 2026, he has been a Full Professor with the Hangzhou Institute of Technology, Xidian University, China. His research interests include Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs), digital twins, and intelligent wireless systems. He serves as a Youth Editor for the Journal of Information and Intelligence and is a Technical Committee Member of the IEEE Consumer Technology Society. He has served as a Guest Editor for special issues of China Communications and the IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society, as a Track Co-Chair of IEEE ICCT 2025, and as a Technical Program Committee member for several leading IEEE international conferences. He received the Youth Scientist Award at UCOM 2025 and the Best Paper Award at IEEE ICCT 2025.
Huiting Yang
Reseach Fellow, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore
Email: huiting_yang@sutd.edu.sg
Dr. Huiting Yang received the B.E. degree in communications engineering, the M.S. degree in space science and technology, and the Ph.D. degree in communications engineering from Xidian University, Xi'an, China, in 2015, 2018, and 2023, respectively. Currently, she is a Research Fellow with Information Systems Technology and Design Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), where she was an International Research Visitor from 2022 to 2023. Her research interests include resource allocation for space-terrestrial integrated networks, network slicing, and 6G.
Yanming Zhang
Research Scientist, Purdue University, IN, USA
Email: zhan6047@purdue.edu
Dr. Yanming Zhang received the B.E. degree in electrical engineering from the China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China, in 2015, the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 2018, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, in 2022. He is currently a Research Scientist with the Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, IN, USA. Before joining Purdue University, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, in 2022, and a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, from 2022 to 2025. He was a recipient of the Merit Prize at the 21st IEEE (HK) AP/MTT Postgraduate Conference. His current research interests include computational electromagnetics, applied electromagnetics, and artificial intelligence for electromagnetics.
Feng Wang
Research Fellow, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore
Email: gwfengwang@gmail.com
Dr. Feng Wang received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in 2016 and 2022, respectively. He is currently a Research Fellow with Information Systems Technology and Design Pillar at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Singapore. His research interests include Non-Terrestrial Networking (NTN), satellite mobility management, and NTN service orchestration. He has orgnized multiple NTN-related symposia and workshops at international conferences. He is currently a member of Youth Editorial Board of Journal of Information and Intelligence.
Derrick Wing Kwan Ng (Fellow, IEEE)
Associate Professor, University of New South Wales, Australia
Email: w.k.ng@unsw.edu.au
Dr. Derrick Wing Kwan Ng received the bachelor's (Hons.) and Master of Philosophy degrees in electronic engineering from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Hong Kong, China, in 2006 and 2008, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree from The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, in November 2012. Following his Ph.D., he was a Senior Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Digital Communications, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany. He is currently a Scientia Associate Professor with the University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia. His research interests include global optimization, Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), physical layer security, IRS-assisted communication, UAV-assisted communication, wireless information and power transfer, and green (energy-efficient) wireless communications. He has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics (Web of Science) since 2018. He was a recipient of Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2017, the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize 2023, the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize 2022, the Best Paper Awards at the WCSP 2020 and 2021, the IEEE TCGCC Best Journal Paper Award 2018, the INISCOM 2018, the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) 2018, 2021, 2023, and 2024, the IEEE International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC) 2016, the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) 2012, the IEEE Global Telecommunication Conference (GLOBECOM) 2011, 2021, and 2023, and the IEEE Third International Conference on Communications and Networking in China 2008. From January 2012 to December 2019, he served as an Editorial Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Communications. He is also an Area Editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications, the Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society, and a member of IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications Executive Editorial Committee.