The Bridge - Issue 3, 2021 - 23

Feature
Facilitating Satellite-Airborne-BalloonTerrestrial
Integration for Dynamic and
Infrastructure-less Networks
By Ahmad Alsharoa, IEEE Senior Member and Gamma Theta 2021, and Mohamed-Slim Alouini, IEEE Fellow
ABSTRACT
This article investigates the potential enhancement
of communication networks by integrating ground
base stations (GBS) with air stations, such as balloon,
airborne, and satellite. The objective is to establish
dynamic bi-directional wireless services (i.e., uplink and
downlink) for ground users in congested and remote
areas. The proposed integration involves satellite,
high-altitude platforms (HAPs), and tethered balloons
(TBs) in the exosphere, stratosphere, and troposphere,
respectively, for better altitude reuse coupled with
emerging optical or other high-frequency directional
transceivers. This will lead to a significant enhancement
in scarce spectrum aggregate efficiency. However, the
air stations deployment and resource managements
in this integrated system faces difficulties. This article
tackles resource management challenges by (i)
providing wireless services to ground users in remote
areas and connecting them with metropolitan and rural
areas and (ii) employing HAPs equipped with freespace-optical
communication modules as back-hauling
backbones. Finally, we illustrate some numerical results
to show the benefit of our proposed integrated system.
Index Terms - Satellite station, high-altitude platforms,
tethered balloons, optimization.
I. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION
Satellite and ground base stations (GBSs), also
known as terrestrial stations, are currently the main
communication systems that provide wireless services
to ground users in remote and metropolitan areas.
While traditional space communications, including
satellite stations, deliver broadband services to ground
users in remote areas, their spectral efficiency is
constrained because of the high pathloss attenuation of
the channel between ground users and satellite station.
Depending on satellite stations only can cause extra
delay for real time services because of their location at
different orbital heights.
In contrast, GBSs cannot support ground users in
remote areas due to their limited coverage areas
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The Bridge - Issue 3, 2021

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