With the increasing interest in wireless communications from solar-powered aircraft-based high altitude platforms (HAPs), it is imperative to assess the feasibility of their deployment in different locations with the constraints on energy consumption and payload weight under consideration. This paper considers the energy management of solar-powered aircraft-based HAPs for wireless communications service provisioning in equatorial regions and regions further up the northern hemisphere. The total solar energy harvested and consumed on the shortest day of the year is analyzed, and it is explained how this determines the feasibility of long endurance, semi-permanent missions. This takes into account the different aircraft-based HAPs and the energy storage systems currently available, and how these can be deployed for wireless communications. We show that the solar-powered HAPs are energy and weight limited, and this depends largely on the platform’s wingspan available for the deployment of solar collectors. Our analysis show that services can be provided for a duration of 15–24 h/day using current platforms, with wingspans ranging between 25–35 m, depending on the configuration and coverage radius. Furthermore, we show that doubling an aircraft’s wingspan can increase its payload capacity by a factor of 6, which in turn enhances its feasibility for wireless communications.

Conventional coverage and capacity from a high altitude platform (HAP) over an extended coverage area suffer significantly from inter-cell interference (ICI), antenna beam broadening, and uneven cell loading, which results in poor edge performance. In this paper, we show how a single antenna array on a HAP can be used to mitigate against these and achieve ubiquitous coverage by forming two tiers of a homogeneous contiguous cellular structure. We propose separate algorithms that implement the two-tier architecture with many antenna beams, which are used to form cells, and associate users with an appropriate cell and tier. A user associates with the cell and tier, which offer the best carrier power-to-noise ratio (CNR) and carrier power-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (CINR) respectively. The performance of the architecture, which is evaluated using simulation, is compared with a typical one-tier architecture. The results show that the two-tier architecture achieves over 30% higher user throughput and enhances throughput fairness and edge-of-cell connectivity by centralising as many users as possible within cells compared to the typical one-tier architecture. These benefits are better exploited by ensuring spectrum orthogonality between the two tiers.

Interest in delivering cellular communication using a high-altitude platform (HAP) is increasing partly due to its wide coverage capability. In this paper, we formulate analytical expressions for estimating the area of a HAP beam footprint, average per-user capacity per cell, average spectral efficiency (SE) and average area spectral efficiency (ASE), which are relevant for radio network planning, especially within the context of HAP extended contiguous cellular coverage and capacity. To understand the practical implications, we propose an enhanced and validated recursive HAP antenna beam-pointing algorithm, which forms HAP cells over an extended service area while considering beam broadening and the degree of overlap between neighbouring beams. The performance of the extended contiguous cellular structure resulting from the algorithm is compared with other alternative schemes using the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) and carrier-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (CINR). Results show that there is a steep reduction in average ASE at the edge of coverage. The achievable coverage is limited by the minimum acceptable average ASE at the edge, among other factors. In addition, the results highlight that efficient beam management can be achieved using the enhanced and validated algorithm, which significantly improves user CNR, CINR, and coverage area compared with other benchmark schemes. A simulated annealing comparison verifies that such an algorithm is close to optimal.