A novel cellular structure for stratospheric platform mobile communications

A novel cellular structure is proposed for the ambitious stratospheric platform mobile communications. The innovated structure adopts a multibeam scanning antenna array to create ring-shaped cells instead of the classical honey cells. This helps in avoiding the impact of positional instability especially the rotational motion of the platform around its vertical axis. Furthermore the transmitted power is reduced as well as the handover and location updating rates. The adaptation of the cell area for traffic balancing is easier than using the traditional hexagonal one. The geometry of the ring cell is analyzed in order to investigate the main parameters affecting the system performance such as the beam visiting time and the beam-scanning rate.