HAPS Cell Design Method for Coverage Extension Considering Coexistence on Terrestrial Mobile Networks

Abstract

High-altitude platform stations (HAPSs) that provide direct communication services to smartphones on the ground are garnering significant attention as innovative mobile communication platforms suitable for ultrawide coverage areas. The deployment of a multi-cell configuration is essential for enhancing communication capacity over large geographical regions. However, designing and optimizing multi-cell configurations proves challenging due to the numerous antenna parameters involved, such as beamwidth and beam direction. HAPSs also hold promise in serving as reliable networks during disasters, as they can quickly restore coverage when terrestrial base stations (BSs) are in failure, allowing users to maintain connectivity via HAPSs using the same frequency band as terrestrial networks. Despite this advantage, HAPSs can potentially cause interference in terrestrial networks during such scenarios, necessitating careful considerations to avoid disrupting existing terrestrial networks. However, the optimization of cell configurations in the coexistence of HAPSs and terrestrial networks remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this paper proposes a design scheme that leverages a genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize antenna parameters for each cell, thereby maximizing both user coverage and area coverage while ensuring coexistence with terrestrial networks. We optimize antenna parameters to increase user coverage and area coverage as a multi-objective optimization problem, resulting in a Pareto front that illustrates the trade-off choices. Additionally, the proposed method protects terrestrial networks by setting the initial beam direction of each cell to avoid interference with terrestrial BSs. Consequently, the GA can initiate optimization with candidate combinations that adhere to the interference constraints of terrestrial networks, thus expediting the optimization process and yielding improved coverage. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms conventional schemes which solely control beam direction, leading to superior coverage. While the results show trade-off between user coverage and area coverage, it is also clarified that considering both types of coverage show the potential to achieve significant improvements in both aspects simultaneously. Moreover, the results highlight the efficacy of the initial beam direction setting in enhancing coverage rates and significantly reducing the number of combinations required for the GA to converge.

Keywords

• Coverage optimization
• genetic algorithm
• HAPS
• non-uniform user distribution
• coexistence between HAPS and terrestrial networks