This paper describes the integration of Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks, wherein space-based network entities collaborate with traditional and emerging terrestrial communication frameworks to furnish pervasive, resilient, and three-dimensional wireless connectivity worldwide toward the 6th Generation of communication networks. This integration supports heterogeneous services, such as enhancing coverage, user experience, system capacity, service reliability, and availability, while also providing high-speed connectivity in remote or disaster-affected areas, improving existing 5th Generation technologies. Various Use Cases are detailed, highlighting the pivotal roles that Non-Terrestrial Networks play in distinguishing between urban/suburban and rural environments, with particular emphasis on transportation ecosystems. Through this analysis, Key Performance Indicators and requirements are delineated to characterize the requisite service quality for these diverse Use Cases. The paper further presents an overview of potential and standards-compliant integrated Terrestrial/Non-Terrestrial architectures, delineating their roles both in backhauling and access across different layers of Non-Terrestrial systems and elements. These insights are derived from studies conducted within the Integrated Terrestrial And Non-Terrestrial Networks (ITA-NTN) project, part of the European Union initiative defined as the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) RESTART Research Program.

Mission Critical (MC) communications take a pivotal role to achieve effective Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) actions. Even though 3GPP standards define MC applications and services in an architectural framework compatible with current 5G mobile networks, real-life experiments and applications of these concepts are still at the very beginning. In this paper, we present an architectural study and related experimental activity on network slicing for MC communications. We implemented these services in a fully virtualized environment, and deployed and tested them in a multi-domain network slicing scenario compliant with the ETSI NFV-MANO specifications. Our work aligns with the 5G approach separating control and data planes. The level of automation in service deployment and the slice isolation features are demonstrated, showing the benefits in terms of application performance, management flexibility, scalability, and quality of service differentiation capabilities.

This paper presents an integrated traffic engineering (TE) system for new generation multilayer networks based on the generalized multiprotocol label switching (GMPLS) paradigm, and reports the performance analysis of such a system. The proposed TE system aims at dynamically reacting to traffic changes and, at the same time, fulfilling quality of service (QoS) requirements for different classes of service. The proposed solution consists of a hybrid routing approach and a bandwidth management strategy. The former makes use of both off-line and on-line methods to accommodate traffic requests. The latter, based on an "elastic" use of the bandwidth, allows the handling of different priorities among data flows, possible preemptions, and rerouting. The proposed TE permits the accommodation of the largest amount of traffic, while guaranteeing good performance to mission-critical services. The main building blocks and the operations of the system are reported and the major advantages are discussed. The performance of the proposed system are compared with the ones relating to a reasonable alternative system based on overprovisioning, to highlight its advantages of in terms of traffic volume that can be accommodated for a given network infrastructure.