Performance and feasibility of different switched-beam antennas for the stratospheric platform mobile communications covering newly developing regions

Extending the mobile radio service to the newly developing regions is necessary for accelerating their economic and social progress. The cost and flexible deployment of such communication systems are the key issues. The emerging technology of stratospheric platform mobile communications is devised for covering such regions. Introducing smart antenna technology with this kind of communication systems provides additional improvements. The paper suggests several switched-beam smart antenna techniques in order to increase the user location accuracy especially in emergency situations, reduce power consumption, efficiently use the radio spectrum and reduce the errors resulting from the positional instability of the platform. In addition, the performance and feasibility of such approaches in terms of the hardware and processing requirements are addressed. The study dictates the adoption of beam-splitting approach as a superior one due to its compromise between the hardware and processing requirements.