Impact of Antenna Configuration on UMTS Performance in High Altitude Platforms

The target of the paper is to study the impact of antenna- and cell configuration of a single high altitude platform (HAP) station on the overall network performance point of view. In the studied approach, one HAP station alone provides UMTS services to terrestrial mobile users. Large number of different antenna and cell configurations has been simulated with a system level Monte Carlo WCDMA simulator. The results emphasize the differences between of the used antenna- and cell configurations. The optimum performance was achieved by using antennas with 2 degree beam width and 6 tiers of cells for the reference location. The overall service probability with high number of users varied from 42 % to 95 %, when the antenna- and cell configuration were updated from the worst to the optimum one. The results of this paper will give some guidelines for the HAP antenna- and cell configuration planning, and emphasize the importance of proper radio network planning when targeting to maximum system performance.