Replacing terrestrial UMTS coverage by HAP in disaster scenarios

This paper discusses the use of high altitude platforms, HAPs, to provide mobile communication services to on-ground customers. The paper explains the behavior of UMTS radio network in a situation, where the service is being provided by HAP and terrestrial base stations in a disaster scenario. In the disaster scenario, a set of adjacent terrestrial cellular base stations in the middle of the network have been disabled. A HAP station has been launched to the disaster location to provide UMTS service. The possible effects between the HAP and the terrestrial UMTS network are assessed from the system point of view by analyzing the simulation results of the radio interface. The results show that the HAP is able to improve the performance in the radio network by providing UMTS coverage from the HAP station. The HAP station is able to restore the disaster area throughput to the level of 70 % from the original level. However, to achieve good network performance using HAP, careful configuration planning is required. Thus with careless HAP configuration design, the HAP service performance could totally be lost.