High Altitude Platform (HAP) Driven Smart Radios: A Novel Concept

Spectrum scarcity experienced due to low utilization of some spectrum bands shows that there is a need for new regulations for spectrum allocation. Static allocation over a wide area, usually a city, makes the spectrum use non efficient. In order to use spectrum more efficiently, cognitive radio concept has been introduced. A cognitive radio is a paradigm for wireless communication in which either network or wireless node itself changes particular transmission or reception parameters to execute its tasks efficiently without interfering with the licensed users. Therefore, cognitive radio (CR) is promising to address portability, interoperability and quick and cost effective development, upgrade and maintenance of waveforms among multiple and varying communications platforms to enable an integrated and ubiquitous communication infrastructure. In this paper, we present a novel concept, namely high altitude platform (HAP) driven smart radios (HDSR), where CR devices are dynamically configured and policies for dynamic spectrum access are beamed with the assistance of a HAP and a back end satellite subsystem. The "proof-of-concept" for the proposed system is performed by a set of simulations. In these simulations, some primary IEEE 802.11b/g users communicate in infrastructure mode through three base stations while some secondary users having different priorities for the available spectrum communicate opportunistically.