High-Altitude Platform Station-Aided Terahertz Satellite Communication Systems with Hardware Impairments

The utilization of terahertz (THz) frequencies in satellite-aerial-ground communication systems stands out as a promising solution to accomplish both global connectivity and extreme data rates requirements of the sixth-generation networks. In the current literature, the impact of non-ideal equipment on the performance of THz satellite-aerial-ground communication systems remains unexplored, which is critical for practical implementations. Hence, this paper analyzes the performance of high-altitude platform station (HAPS)-aided THz satellite communication system in the presence of $α$-$μ$ fading, pointing errors, absorption loss, and hardware impairments for different atmospheric conditions. In the system of interest, it is assumed that variable-gain amplify-and-forward protocol is utilized at HAPS nodes (systems), and the HAPS system, which provides the maximum end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), is selected for transmission. To evaluate the outage, asymptotic outage, and ergodic capacity bounds for the system, the probability density function, cumulative distribution function (CDF), and asymptotic CDF related to the upper bound of the end-to-end SNR are obtained. By using these statistics, the effects of hardware impairment levels, zenith angles, and atmospheric conditions on the system performance are examined. The results have shown that hardware impairments cause power loss in outage performance and reduce the system capacity. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the outage probability depends on either fading or pointing error characteristics in high SNR region and also that the system performance almost remains the same for lower zenith angles in HAPS-to-ground link regardless of the atmospheric conditions.

A Holistic Link Budget Analysis for mmWave and THz Communications in Non-Terrestrial Networks

The non-terrestrial network (NTN) architecture has gained significant interest from the academia owing to its versatility and the ability to provide worldwide service. To achieve extremely high data rates in NTNs, as intended in the sixth-generation (6G) communication systems, millimeter wave (mmWave) and terahertz (THz) frequencies can be considered, enabling substantial bandwidth and data transmission capacity, which makes them highly suitable for NTN applications. However, these high-frequency signals suffer from significant propagation challenges, including atmospheric attenuation, pointing errors, and various environmental effects. Therefore, a comprehensive link budget analysis is essential to accurately assess the feasibility of mmWave/THz-based NTN systems. Existing studies in the literature often fail to fully capture certain frequency-, altitude-, and direction-dependent effects observed in mmWave/THz transmission or possible communication scenarios within the NTN architecture. In particular, while most prior works primarily focus on free-space loss or atmospheric attenuation, this study adopts a much more comprehensive approach. In this work, a detailed link budget analysis is conducted for mmWave/THz NTNs, considering free-space loss, atmospheric absorption, weather-induced effects, ionospheric disturbances, polarization mismatches, feeder losses, antenna and circuitry constraints, fading, pointing errors, and non-white noise characteristics. The results have revealed that the multi-layer structure of the NTN architecture can help reducing the excessive loss levels to a certain level that can be tolerated by high-gain directional antennas/arrays, providing multi-gigabit links and making mmWave/THz NTNs feasible for 6G communication systems.

A Novel Piecewise Atmospheric Attenuation Model for Free Space Optical Links in Vertical Heterogeneous Networks

Free-space optical (FSO) communication is emerging as a key backhaul technology for next-generation vertical heterogeneous networks (VHetNets), whose architecture spans satellites, high-altitude platform stations (HAPS), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and terrestrial nodes. Along these vertical and slant paths, optical beams traverse successive atmospheric layers that may contain clouds, fog, rain, and aerosols, conditions that conventional single-coefficient Beer-Lambert models typically handle only in isolation. Instead of such simplified formulas, we present a unified attenuation model that incorporates aerosols, fog, rain, cloud layers, and drizzle, accounts for the zenith angle, and provides a holistic estimate of the cumulative power loss across atmospheric layers. Numerical results show several-decibel attenuation variations across representative weather scenarios, while the difference between the proposed model predictions and the layer-resolved MODTRAN simulations remains within 1 dB, thereby validating the accuracy of the proposed model and its practical relevance for VHetNet link-budget studies.

Energy Harvesting in High Altitude Platform Station Enabled Sensor Networks

High altitude platform station (HAPS) systems are becoming crucial facilitators for future wireless communication networks, enhancing connectivity across all vertical communication layers, including small Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices, terrestrial users, and aerial devices. In the context of the widely recognized vertical heterogeneous network (VHetNet) architecture, HAPS systems can provide service to both aerial and ground users. However, integrating HAPS systems as a core element in the VHetNet architecture presents a considerable energy challenge, marking a prominent constraint for their operation. Driven by this challenge, we introduce an energy harvesting (EH) strategy tailored for HAPS systems, enabling a HAPS system to gather energy from another HAPS system, which is not constrained by energy limitations. To assess the performance capabilities of the proposed model, we derive outage probability (OP), ergodic capacity (EC) and verify them by using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. Moreover, we explore the system in terms of throughput. The findings reveal that harnessing full potential of EH stands as a viable approach to meet the energy demands of HAPS systems.

Free-Space Optical (FSO) Satellite Networks Performance Analysis: Transmission Power, Latency, and Outage Probability

In free-space optical satellite networks (FSOSNs), satellites can have different laser inter-satellite link (LISL) ranges for connectivity. Greater LISL ranges can reduce network latency of the path but can also result in an increase in transmission power for satellites on the path. Consequently, this tradeoff between satellite transmission power and network latency should be investigated, and in this work we examine it in FSOSNs drawing on the Starlink Phase 1 Version 3 and Kuiper Shell 2 constellations for different LISL ranges and different inter-continental connections. We use appropriate system models for calculating the average satellite transmission power and network latency. The results show that the mean network latency decreases and mean average satellite transmission power increases with an increase in LISL range. For the Toronto--Sydney inter-continental connection in an FSOSN with Starlink's Phase 1 Version 3 constellation, when the LISL range is approximately 2,900 km, the mean network latency and mean average satellite transmission power intersect are approximately 135 ms and 380 mW, respectively. For an FSOSN with the Kuiper Shell 2 constellation in this inter-continental connection, this LISL range is around 3,800 km, and the two parameters are approximately 120 ms and 700 mW, respectively. For the Toronto--Istanbul and Toronto--London inter-continental connections, the LISL ranges at the intersection are different and vary from 2,600 km to 3,400 km. Furthermore, we analyze outage probability performance of optical uplink/downlink due to atmosphere attenuation and turbulence.

On the Performance of UAV Relaying with Reconfigurable Antenna and Media Based Modulation in the Presence of Shadowed Fading

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted significant interest from the academia and industry most recently. Motivated by the wide usage of UAVs, this paper considers UAV communication with reconfigurable antenna (RA) in the presence of fading and shadowing effects which occur due to tall buildings and skyscrapers in urban areas. More precisely, RA offers to receive information through mirror activation patterns (MAPs) so that it can achieve a receive diversity with decreased error probability by using only one radio frequency (RF) chain. Also, media based modulation (MBM) technique for data transmission with MAPs can be exploited by using RAs with reduced cost. To quantify the performance of the proposed UAV system, we derive a tight upper bound for the overall error probability by considering approximated channel model to the standardization studies for UAVs. The results have shown that RAs can make the overall system more resilient to shadowing and fading effects in terms of error performance, and they are energy efficient.

Link Budget Analysis for Free-Space Optical Satellite Networks

Free-space optical satellite networks (FSOSNs) will employ free-space optical links between satellites and between satellites and ground stations, and the link budget for optical inter-satellite links and optical uplink/downlink is analyzed in this paper. The satellites in these FSOSNs will have limited energy and thereby limited power, and we investigate the effect of link distance and link margin on optical inter-satellite link transmission power, and the effect of slant distance, elevation angle, and link margin on optical uplink/downlink transmission power. We model these optical links and compute the results for various parameters. We observe that the transmission power increases when the link distance increases for inter-satellite and uplink/downlink communications, while the transmission power decreases when the elevation angle increases for uplink/downlink transmission. We also observe an inverse relationship between link margin and link distance. Furthermore, we highlight some practical insights and design guidelines gained from this analysis.

Cooperation in Space: HAPS-Aided Optical Inter-Satellite Connectivity with Opportunistic Scheduling

Issues with tracking, precision pointing, and Doppler shift are the major sources of performance loss in laser inter-satellite communication that can severely decrease the coverage and overall performance of satellite constellations. As a solution to these problems, we propose a cooperation strategy in which a high altitude platform station (HAPS) staying at a quasi-stationary position contributes to the inter-satellite connectivity. In this setup, the HAPS node uses two different scheduling approaches: one that relies on the zenith angle; the other on instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio. To quantify the performance of the proposed scheme, overall outage probabilities for the two scheduling methods are obtained. In addition, guidelines for the design of practical inter-satellite networks are provided.

Optical Satellite Eavesdropping

In recent years, satellite communication (SatCom) systems have been widely used for navigation, broadcasting application, disaster recovery, weather sensing, and even spying on the Earth. As the number of satellites is highly increasing and with the radical revolution in wireless technology, eavesdropping on SatCom will be possible in next-generation networks. In this context, we introduce the satellite eavesdropping approach, where an eavesdropping satellite can intercept optical communications established between a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite and a high altitude platform station (HAPS). Specifically, we propose two practical eavesdropping scenarios for satellite-to-HAPS (downlink) and HAPS-to-satellite (uplink) optical communications, where the eavesdropper satellite can eavesdrop on the transmitted signal or the received signal. To quantify the secrecy performance of the scenarios, the average secrecy capacity (ASC) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) expressions are derived and validated with Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. We observe that turbulence-induced fading significantly impacts the secrecy performance of free-space optical (FSO) communication.

On the Performance of HAPS-assisted Hybrid RF-FSO Multicast Communication Systems

Multicast routing is considered a promising approach for real-time applications to address the massive data traffic demands. In this work, we study the outage probability of a multicast downlink communication network for non-terrestrial communication systems. More precisely, we propose two practical use-cases. In the former model, we propose a high altitude platform station (HAPS) aided mixed radio frequency (RF)/ free-space optical (FSO)/RF communication scheme where a terrestrial ground station intends to communicate with a cluster of nodes through two stratospheric HAPS systems. In the latter model, we assume that the line of sight (LOS) connectivity is inaccessible between the two HAPS systems due to high attenuation caused by large propagation distances. Thereby, we propose a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite-aided mixed RF/FSO/FSO/RF communication. For the proposed scenarios, outage probability expressions are derived and validated with Monte Carlo (MC) simulations under different conditions.