  Massive Multiple Input-Multiple Output (mMIMO) technique has been considered
an efficient standard to improve the transmission rate significantly for the
following wireless communication systems, such as 5G and beyond. However,
implementing this technology has been facing a critical issue of acquiring much
channel state information. Primarily, this problem becomes more criticising in
the integrated satellite and terrestrial networks (3GPP-Release 15) due to the
countable high transmission delay. To deal with this challenging problem, the
mMIMO-empowered non-coherent technique can be a promising solution. To our best
knowledge, this paper is the first work considering employing the non-coherent
mMIMO in satellite communication systems. This work aims to analyse the
challenges and opportunities emerging with this integration. Moreover, we
identified the issues in this conjunction. The preliminary results presented in
this work show that the performance measured in bit error rate (BER) and the
number of antennas are not far from that required for terrestrial links.
Furthermore, thanks to mMIMO in conjunction with the non-coherent approach, we
can work in a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, which is an excellent
advantage for satellite links.
