Evaluation of CINR in multiple HAP constellations considering terrain configuration

High altitude platforms (HAPs) equipped with communications payload support incremental deployment of the network. This can be exploited in a fixed user operating environment to increase the system capacity through the use of multiple high altitude platforms (HAPs) serving the same coverage area. The performance of such a system in real operating environment depends heavily on the propagation channel characteristics and the configuration of the terrain. In this paper, the influence of terrain configuration on the system performance and capacity is evaluated for two representative multiple HAP constellations, one consisting of 4 HAPs in a single ring and the other consisting of 16 HAPs in two rings. We compare simulation results in terms of CINR distribution across the coverage area for the representative mountainous terrain configuration with the reference theoretical case without any terrain.