Integrated Services on High Altitude Platform: Receiver Driven Smart Selection of HAP-Geo Satellite Wireless Access Segment and Performance Evaluation

A renewed interest in the development of high-altitude platforms (HAPs), which are stratospheric aircraft or airship carrying payloads tailored for a wide range of applications in telecommunications and remote sensing, is becoming progressively widespread. HAPs offer a reduced propagation delay and they are especially suitable for interactive multimedia services. In this paper, the inter-working between HAP and satellite segments in an integrated QoS architecture has been addressed. A new way to manage integrated services over a new hybrid wireless platform has been proposed. A smart terminal device has been considered in order to perform an intelligent switching on the wireless access segment. The switching criteria applied in the HAP/satellite architecture is based on the available bandwidth and on the admissible data packet end-to-end delay. Performance evaluations of the integrated HAP–satellite platform have been evaluated in terms of bandwidth utilization and number of admitted calls. The simulations show an improvement of admitted calls, reduced data packet end-to-end delay and increased bandwidth utilization.