Modern digital systems increasingly depend on reliable communication between distributed devices, users and infrastructure, often operating in remote, mobile or hard-to-reach environments. At the same time, dense urban environments and smart cities require additional communication capacity in specific situations, such as large public events, emergency response, temporary infrastructure overloads or services that need resilient connectivity across different parts of the city.

The hi-STAR project addresses these challenges by developing a flexible framework for integrating terrestrial 5G networks with Low-Earth-Orbit satellite communication. By combining these two communication layers, the project explores how user traffic can be distributed more efficiently between terrestrial and satellite parts of the network, supporting high user mobility, broader coverage and more reliable access to digital services.

An important aspect of the project is the use of AI to support traffic management within this hybrid communication framework. This makes hi-STAR relevant for remote monitoring, IoT systems, smart city services, mobility applications, industrial digitalization and emergency or high-demand scenarios where large numbers of connected devices and users need stable, adaptive and scalable communication.

The participants of the project are the University of Belgrade – School of Electrical Engineering, University of Niš – Faculty of Electronic Engineering and the Innovation Center of the School of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade.