Study and Performance Evaluation of Bandwidth Controls over High Altitude Platforms

The demand of bandwidth for TCP/IP based services is growing significantly and the wireless networks are becoming a frequently employed solution to satisfy it. In the wireless scenario, High Altitude Platform (HAP) communications represent a reality, even if absorption and scattering of radio waves by atmospheric components may affect the performance of the communication system. In particular, rain causes severe attenuation so creating communications detriments. The dynamic bandwidth allocation among earth stations may be part of rain fading countermeasures aimed at improving the level of Quality of Service (QoS). The paper formalizes the bandwidth allocation process as a Multi - Objective Programming (MOP) problem; describes four allocation schemes already in the literature by using the MOP framework and proposes one new algorithm that exploits MOP features: it is called Minimum Distance (MD) algorithm. The allocation strategies described are compared each other to highlight the peculiar characteristics for each of them and to show the performance of MD scheme. The reference metrics are the packet loss probability and the allocated bandwidth.