Background

High Altitude Platforms (HAPs) are an alternative way of providing wireless communication services from the stratosphere (typically17-22km altitude), using airships or aircraft. HAPs provide an excellent and effective alternative to terrestrial service provision because their aerial viewpoint improves the chance of achieving Line of Sight (LoS) connectivity and allows for rapid service deployment.

Technology Overview

A single HAP equipped with an array of antennas can deploy many beams, each of which can form a cell, and unlike in a terrestrial situation, the cells can be dynamically directed anywhere inside the service area, according to short or long term fluctuations in demand. Antenna beam pointing may be executed in a flexible way, but identify a suitable practical method of understanding where to point the beams in order to maximise useful coverage, capacity and capacity density of the system has hitherto not been realised. Thus, the invention delivers an antenna beam pointing scheme called RF clustering.

Benefits

Will maximise revenues and/or quality of service/quality of experience for telco operators.
Will assist with meeting radio regulatory constraints for telco operators.
Ability to prioritise placement and shape of beams from a HAP using a form of reinforcement learning that uses received power captured by ‘listening cells’ on the HAP from users on the ground.

Applications

Can be used on high altitude platforms and other forms of lower altitude airborne platforms.
Cellular, voice, Internet, and video could be provided for extended rural coverage up to 200 km in diameter, in comparison with 20 to 40 km for a common terrestrial rural mobile or cellular system.
Providing significant enhancement in reliability and accuracy to the Global Positioning System (GPS) by adding Differential GPS sources to the HAPs payload.
Surveillance of pollution for environmental-conservation purposes, including monitoring concentrations of carbon dioxide, ozone, and radiation levels.

Opportunity

The University is searching for licensing opportunities and collaborative research partners.

RF Clustering for High Altitude Platform (HAP) Optimisation

Patents

IP Status

Seeking