Autonomously Coordinated Multi-HAPS Communications Network: Failure Mitigation in Volcanic Incidence Area Coverage

This paper investigates the coordination of multiple autonomous High Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS) in a volcanic cloud emergency scenario for aerial communications coverage. Deploying unmanned(pilot-less) HAPS over areas impacted by volcanic ash clouds is proposed in this work. Volcanic ash clouds stretching over distances can be challenging and requires resilient wireless communications infrastructure. In this work a self-organising solar-powered HAPS network is presented and its resilience tested in the event of the failure of a participating HAPS in the swarm. The future of implementing swarm of unmanned HAPS for communications services requires autonomous capabilities as demonstrated in this paper. A swarm intelligence based algorithm developed for this work is applied to coordinate a swarm of HAPS for communications coverage. The paper highlights the demands of such self-organising infrastructure and how failure may impact communications coverage, especially in emergency scenarios where high availability and reliability of the supporting communications infrastructure is critical.