Facilitating Satellite-Airborne-Balloon-Terrestrial Integration for Dynamic and Infrastructure-less Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores integrating satellite, balloon, airborne, and terrestrial stations to improve data throughput and spectrum efficiency for ground users in remote and congested areas, addressing deployment and resource management challenges.

Contribution

It proposes a novel integrated system combining various air and space stations with advanced transceivers and resource management strategies for enhanced wireless connectivity.

Findings

Numerical results demonstrate significant throughput improvements.

Integration of air stations enhances spectrum efficiency.

HAPs with optical back-hauling improve network connectivity.

Abstract

This magazine investigates the potential enhancement of the data throughput of ground users by integrating ground base stations (GBS) with air stations, such as balloon, airborne, and satellite. The objective is to establish dynamic bi-directional wireless services (i.e., uplink and downlink) for ground users in congested and remote areas. The proposed integration involves satellite, high-altitude platforms (HAPs), and tethered balloons (TBs) in the exosphere, stratosphere, and troposphere, respectively, for better altitude reuse coupled with emerging optical or other high-frequency directional transceivers. This will lead to a significant enhancement in scarce spectrum aggregate efficiency. However, the air stations deployment and resource managements in this integrated system faces difficulties. This article tackles resource management challenges by (i) providing wireless services to ground users in remote areas and connecting them with metropolitan and rural areas and (ii) employing HAPs equipped with free-space-optical communication modules as back-hauling backbones. Finally, we illustrate some numerical results to show the benefit of our proposed integrated system.