A Balloon-Based Wireless Relay System for Disaster Response

When a disaster occurs, various initiatives are often carried out to rapidly restore mobile communication to service areas where communication failures have occurred. As one such initiative, we have developed a balloon-based wireless relay system in which a non- regenerative wireless repeater is installed on a balloon. Through our experimentation, we confirmed that coverage within a 5 km radius was successfully achieved. In this paper, we present an overview of our balloon-based wireless relay system and the means to its deployment.