Energy Harvesting in High Altitude Platform Station Enabled Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy harvesting strategy for high altitude platform stations (HAPS) in wireless networks, enabling energy transfer between HAPS systems to address energy constraints and improve network performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel energy harvesting method for HAPS systems that allows energy transfer between HAPS units, enhancing their operational sustainability.

Findings

Energy harvesting significantly reduces HAPS energy constraints.

The model improves outage probability and ergodic capacity.

Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Abstract

High altitude platform station (HAPS) systems are becoming crucial facilitators for future wireless communication networks, enhancing connectivity across all vertical communication layers, including small Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices, terrestrial users, and aerial devices. In the context of the widely recognized vertical heterogeneous network (VHetNet) architecture, HAPS systems can provide service to both aerial and ground users. However, integrating HAPS systems as a core element in the VHetNet architecture presents a considerable energy challenge, marking a prominent constraint for their operation. Driven by this challenge, we introduce an energy harvesting (EH) strategy tailored for HAPS systems, enabling a HAPS system to gather energy from another HAPS system, which is not constrained by energy limitations. To assess the performance capabilities of the proposed model, we derive outage probability (OP), ergodic capacity (EC) and verify them by using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. Moreover, we explore the system in terms of throughput. The findings reveal that harnessing full potential of EH stands as a viable approach to meet the energy demands of HAPS systems.