Improving the System Performance of High Altitude Platforms Serving Suburban Areas

Abstract: High Altitude Platforms (HAP) has been evolving to make a new history in wireless communications infrastructure. A number of applications and services have been proposed for HAP based communications which advance HAP over terrestrial and satellite infrastructure for future communications. Providing high speed multimedia mobile communications through HAPs to the users of Third Generation (3G) holds strong position using one of the proposed band, 2GHz. In this study we investigated how to improve the performance of 3G serving from HAP over a territory having suburban characteristics. Two proposed channel models, free space loss and shadowing loss, has been used to analyze the performance of HAP systems at 2GHz frequency band for suburban regions. Three different parameters namely antenna bore point, HAP antenna roll off factor and user antenna roll off factor have proposed to improve the performance of HAP systems while considering suburban regions. A scenario has introduced consisting of an ideal suburban and rural region to serve 3G services while emphasizing on suburban region. The number of HAPs required to serve the defined suburban region is restricted to at least three due to elevation dependent losses in the scenario. The three proposed parameters have been used to improve the performance of 3G services over the selected suburban region. Application of the parameters over suburban region gives different performances which can be categorized in different ways. Some of the parameters are more elastic than others for a certain coverage area. We conclude with adaptive application of the parameters for 3G services over suburban area to have improved performance of HAP.