High-Altitude UAS Pseudo-Satellites: Architecture for End-to-End Military Communications

Abstract

High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellites (HAPS) have been identified as a potential option to either supplement or replace various military communications services. A network of HAPS aircraft operating at an altitude of 20km offers localized, high performance services to military operations. The intention of this work is to investigate whether a network of HAPS (specifically Airbus’ Zephyr S platform) is preferable to that of standard military communications infrastructure. Individual technologies were not studied directly