5G and beyond mobile networks are envisioned as the fundamental components that drive business and societal transformation. The deterioration of the natural environment and climate change have raised questions regarding the role of the mobile network ecosystem and its potential to accelerate innovations in industrial and societal sustainability. This paper describes the challenges facing 5G/6G mobile networks from sectors essential for the sustainable use of natural resources, which include smart agriculture and forestry, biodiversity monitoring, and water management. Based on recent advancements in the above-mentioned domains, the identification of use cases and their requirements are performed together with the evaluation of current and expected future support provided by 5G and 6G networks. Finally, a list of open issues and challenges to be tackled to enable the implementation of carrier-grade services for these sectors using 5G and 6G platforms is presented.

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is a promising field of services based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which aims to provide people and cargo transportation services in underserved areas. The recent advancements in the fields of aviation and mobile telecommunication networks have opened up multiple opportunities for the development of disruptive AAM applications. This paper presents the overview and identifies the major requirements of emerging AAM use cases to confront them with the features provided by the 5G System (5GS), which is commonly considered the key enabler in providing commercial AAM services. The major benefits, gaps, and issues regarding using 5GS to serve AAM operations are identified and discussed. Finally, the future perspectives for AAM services are outlined with a focus on the potential benefit that can be provided as the mobile network evolves towards 6G.

The services based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have started to be used in many countries but not on a large scale yet. The paper describes the present status of UAV services and a concept of a solution for large-scale deployment of safe and reliable UAV services that use the 5G network for communication with UAVs. Based on the Standards Developing Organizations and related industry fora activities, unmanned traffic and airspace regulations, especially the commonly supported concept of Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management (UTM), UAV-related communication requirements and 5G System (5GS) features, we have developed an alternative approach to the integration of UAV and 5GS. The proposed concept includes a set of enablers that can be provided by Mobile Network Operators in order to not only support but also leverage UAV services. As work on many items is still in progress, we identify a list of open issues and challenges and present them at the end of the paper with the main focus on the MNO–UTM provider relationship and safe flights.

Ubiquitous connectivity is envisioned through the integration of terrestrial (TNs) and non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). However, NTNs face multiple routing and Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning challenges due to the mobility of network nodes. Distributed Software-Defined Networking (SDN) combined with Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) is widely used to introduce programmability and intelligent Traffic Engineering (TE) in TNs, yet applying DRL to NTNs is hindered by frequently changing state sizes, model scalability, and coordination issues. This paper introduces 3DQR, a novel TE framework that combines hierarchical multi-controller SDN, hierarchical MADRL based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and network topology predictions for QoS path provisioning, effective load distribution, and flow rejection minimisation in future 3D networks. To enhance SDN scalability, introduced are metrics and path operations abstractions to facilitate domain agents coordination by the global agent. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, 3DQR is the first routing scheme to integrate MADRL and GNNs for optimising centralised routing and path allocation in SDN-based 3D mobile networks. The evaluations show up to a 14% reduction in flow rejection rate, a 50% improvement in traffic distribution, and effective QoS class prioritisation compared to baseline techniques. 3DQR also exhibits strong transfer capabilities, giving consistent performance gains in previously unseen environments.