Design of High Altitude Platforms Cellular Communications

Cellular communications using high altitude platforms (HAPs) will predominate the existing conventional terrestrial or satellite systems but requires some optimization especially in the cellular radio coverage design. The design of HAPs cellular system suffers from increasing cell area when directing the same beam to cover lower elevation regions and therefore requires some modification in its location. In this paper either spot-beam antennas or antenna phased arrays are used in the radio coverage which are optimized in directing their beams to satisfy mostly uniform cellular layout with minimal coverage problems such as coverage gaps between cells or excessive cells overlap. The cells locations determination is done through proposed algorithm that takes into consideration the cell area increase at lower elevation angles and provides mostly uniform radio coverage especially at the cell edges.