Channel characterization and performance evaluation of mobile communication employing stratospheric platforms

Stratospheric platforms have been recently proposed as a new wireless infrastructure for realizing the next generation of communication systems. To provide high quality services, an investigation of the wireless stratospheric platform channel is essential. This paper proposes a definition and describes an analysis of the wireless channel for the link between stratospheric platforms and terrestrial mobile users based on an experiment in a semi-urban environment. Narrowband channel characteristics are presented in terms of Ricean factor (K factor) and local mean received power over a wide range of elevation angles ranging from 10° to 90°. Finally, we evaluated average bit error probability based on the proposed channel model to examine the channel performance. For the environment in which the measurements were conducted, we find that elevation angles greater than 40° yield better performance.