Radio aspects of a stratospheric broadband wireless system

The High Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS) is a novel telecommunications network, which employs a proprietary stratospheric platform technology to provide broadband wireless communications services around the world. The stratospheric platform is a super-pressurized helium-filled solar/fuel-cell powered airship with enough payload and power capacity to support all of a metropolitan area's broadband communications requirements. Using propulsion and thermal control the platform will be kept stationary for no less than 5 years at 20 km altitude. HAPS is considered to be a revolutionary opportunity for wireless industry, systems with several economic and technological advantages over both space- or ground-based counterparts which will offer fixed, or transportable, full duplex E-I uplink and 10 Mbps downlink services to the desktop or laptop. This is sufficient to support such multimedia services as video-telephony, low cost video-conferencing, and high speed Internet connectivity. The services will include user authentication, location registration, link encryption, and bandwidth-on-demand. The built-in security measure provides wire-line equivalent privacy (WEP) to ensure high degree of privacy of communications.