A Tutorial on AI-Enabled Non-Terrestrial Networks in 6G

Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN) are expected to be a critical component of 6th Generation (6G) networks, providing ubiquitous, continuous, and scalable services. Nevertheless, NTN comes with some new issues, such as long propagation delay, high Doppler shift, frequent handover scenarios, spectrum sharing with existing services, intricate beam and resource allocation, and more, that must be handled for exploiting its advantages. To address these challenges, this paper presents Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a potential solution due to its ability to capture complex correlations among different network parameters to solve these issues and offer a practical framework with competitive performances in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we will provide an overview of AI as an enabling tool for NTN, discussing potential research scopes and the challenges associated with utilizing AI-enabled NTN.