Performance improvement on the Downlink HAPS communication channel employing MIMO antenna

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is one of the latest generations of the mobile cellular technology, while High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) is envisaged to be the novel wireless infrastructure. Compared with existing wireless system such as terrestrial and satellite system, HAPS have been proposed to be a complementary technology of mobile cellular system. HAPS channel characteristic can be approached using Ricean fading model. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of downlink HAPS channel in delivering LTE services using MIMO antenna of 2×1 and 2×2. To improve the performance. Based on computer simulation, MIMO 2×1 can improve LTE Downlink performance of 1.4 – 12.3 dB for BER 10
⁻³
. Additionally, MIMO 2×2 can improve the performance more significant with 7.7 – 15.7 dB for the same BER value.