Capacity and Coverage Analysis of High Altitude Platform (HAP) Antenna Arrays for Rural Vehicular Broadband Services

In this paper, the deployment of a High Altitude Platform (HAP) exploiting the mmWave bands to provide broadband infotainment services for vehicular users in rural areas, that, otherwise, would have little or no broadband connectivity is proposed. In this context, an investigation into the use of steerable beam directional antennas to provide performance improvements in terms of Carrier to Noise Ratio (CNR) and high data rates for Line of sight (LOS) HAP beams is undertaken. An analysis of coverage and capacity for clusters of vehicular users utilizing HAP arrays with different numbers of antenna elements is presented. Simulation results indicate the minimum number of clusters that will be required for a given antenna array in order to achieve at least a 95% coverage while simultaneously providing an upper bound of average user capacity of 135 Mbps, and a lower bound of 34 Mbps, as for the 900 antenna element case. Results additionally show that a maximum user capacity of 50 Mbps can be attained by users at the mobile edge utilizing more than 64 array elements despite the increased path loss experienced by these users.