Broadband Wireless Services from High Altitude Long Operation (Halo Network)

Presented by A.VENKATESH
Reg.No:y9ec1402 Mobile: 9912999512

e-mail: venky.ece.15@gmail.com G.V.R&S College of engineering & technology

Abstract
Broadband wireless millimeter wavelength services provided from a High Altitude Long Operation (HALO) Aircraft are now feasible. Our talk will emphasize the conceptual design of a "bandwidth-on-demand" wireless network whose data rates to and from the subscriber will measure in the multi-megabit per second range. A variety of metropolitan area spectrum bands offer the needed bandwidth. An attractive choice is the LMDS band near 28 GHz and system characteristics at this frequency will be described. The HALO Aircraft fuselage will house packet switching circuitry and fast digital network functions. The communications antenna and related components will be located in a pod suspended below the aircraft fuselage. To offer "ubiquitous" service throughout a large region, the HALO antenna will utilize multiple beams arranged in a typical cellular pattern. Broadband channels to subscribers in adjacent cells will be separated in frequency. As the beams traverse over a user location, the virtual path through the packet switch will be changed to perform a beam-to-beam handoff. Overviews of the system architecture and the network elements will be presented along with descriptions of the frequency plan and equipment. The utilization of components under development for terrestrial LMDS products will be described.

Introduction:
Passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the slow growth of infrastructure for transacting multimedia messages (those integrating voice, text, sound, images, and video) have stimulated an intense race to deploy non-traditional infrastructure to serve businesses and consumers at affordable prices. The game is new and the playing field is more level than ever before. Opportunities exist for entrepreneurs to challenge the market dominance enjoyed for years by incumbents. New types of service providers will emerge. An electronic "information fabric" of a quilted characterincluding space, atmospheric, and terrestrial data communications layerswill emerge that promises to someday link every digital information device on the planet. Packetswitched data networks will meld with connection-oriented telephony networks. Communications infrastructures will be shared more efficiently among users to offer dramatic reductions in cost and large increases of effective data rates. An era of inexpensive bandwidth has begun which will transform the nature of commerce. The convergence of innovative technologies and manufacturing capabilities affecting aviation, millimeter wave wireless, and multi-media communications industries enables Angel Technologies Corporation and its partners

to pursue new wireless broadband communications services. The HALO Network will offer ubiquitous access to any subscriber within a "super metropolitan area" from an aircraft operating at high altitude. The aircraft will serve as the hub of the HALO Network serving tens to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Each subscriber will be able to communicate at multimegabit per second data rates through a simple-to-install subscriber unit. The HALO Network will be steadily evolved at a pace with the emergence of data communications technology worldwide. The HALO Network will be a universal wireless communications network solution. It will be deployed globally on a city-by-city basis. The equipment needed to perform the functions of this broadband wireless service will be evolutionary in nature, not revolutionary. Most of the technology already exists. The engineering effort will be focused primarily at adapting and integrating the existing components and subsystems from terrestrial markets into a complete network solution. Proven technology will be used to the maximum extent. Since the HALO Aircraft are operated from regional airports, the equipment will be routinely maintained and calibrated. This also allows for equipment upgrades as technology advances yield lower cost and weight and provide increased performance.

1. Birth Of The HALO Network HALO aircraft represent a new layer in the hierarchy of wireless communications, a 10-mile tall tower in the stratosphere above rain showers and below meteor showers; i.e., a communications layer that will be high above terrestrial towers and well below satellite constellations. For broadband wireless services, the airborne node of the HALO Network can extend wireless broadband services to nearly every potential end user residing in a super-metropolitan area, i.e., several thousands of square miles, and can do so with an inexpensive infrastructure measured in the cost per dwelling passed. My talk will present the architecture and explain the concept of operations of the HALO Network. It will describe key characteristics of the HALO aircraft, the network equipment onboard, and the user terminals. Earlier 1,2 papers introduced the HALO Network. The paper by 3 Djuknic highlighted the unique advantages of stratospheric platforms for providing wireless communications services and is a good reference for use by the engineering community.

Angel Technologies Corporation and its partners are highly encouraged by technological and manufacturing advances in the aviation, millimeter wave wireless, data communications, computer networking, and multimedia communications fields. We believe that we have an opportunity to deploy a novel broadband communications network. Our work suggests the HALO Network will be able to offer wireless broadband communications services to a "super metropolitan area," an area encompassing a typical large city and its surrounding communities. The aircraft will carry the "hub" of the network from which we will serve multiple tens, perhaps multiple hundreds, of thousands of end users on the ground. Each end user will be able to communicate at multimegabit per second bit rates through a simple-to-install user terminal. The HALO Network will be evolved at a pace with the emergence globally of key technologies from the data communications, millimeter wave RF, and network equipment fields. The HALO Network will be a template that Angel will evolve and replicate to grow a global business. Much of the technology needed already exists. The engineering development effort is thus focusing on adapting and integrating components and subsystems from competitive markets. Proven technology, components, and subsystems will be used

As pervasively as possible. Adaptation has been given over innovation and basic development.

The HALO aircraft will be operated in shifts from regional airports. While on the ground, the network

equipment aboard the aircraft will be assessed, maintained and upgraded on a routine basis to ensure optimal performance. Our operating plan specifies regular equipment upgrades in order to leverage technology advances for yielding lower cost and weight and for providing increased performance.

The HALO/Proteus airplane has been specially designed to carry the hub of the HALO Network. The airplane can carry a weight of approximately one ton in the stratosphere. The airplane is essentially an equipment bus from which commercial wireless services will be offered. A fleet of aircraft will be cycled in shifts to achieve continuous service. Each shift on station will have an average duration of approximately eight hours. The HALO/Proteus airplane will maintain station at an altitude above 51 Kft in a volume of airspace

resembling a distorted torus with a typical diameter less than 8 nautical miles. The look angle, defined to be the angle subtended between the local horizon and the airplane with the user terminal at the vertex, will be greater than a minimum value of 20 degrees. [The minimum look angle (MLA) for a given user terminal along the perimeter of the service footprint is defined to occur whenever the airplane achieves the longest slant range from that terminal while flying within the designated airspace.] Under these assumptions, the signal footprint will cover an area of approximately 2,000 to 3,000 square miles, an area large enough to encompass a typical city and its neighboring communities. Such a high value for the MLA ensures a line-of-sight connection to nearly every rooftop in the signal footprint, and high availability during heavy rainfall for most of the major cities in North America, for example, especially for broadband data rates propagated in the K/Ka bands. Consequently, the HALO aircraft can provide a signal footprint that is effectively ubiquitous, and potential end users too expensive to reach through terrestrial infrastructure can then gain access through the 10-mile tower offered by the airborne HALO communications node.

By selecting MMW frequencies, a broadband network of high capacity can be realized. Carrier frequency bandwidths on the scale from 100 MHz to 1,000 MHz have been

licensed and may be made available through partnerships or through allocation by government spectrum regulatory authorities. Small antenna apertures on the scale of 1 foot will

provide narrow beam widths, and thus the user terminals can be compact yet offer high gain. Also, a multi-aperture antenna array can fit in an airborne pod with dimensions practical and acceptable to aerodynamics. The airborne antenna array can be configured to project a pattern of many cells numbering from one hundred to more than one thousand. Each cell on the ground will cover an area of a few square miles to several tens of square miles. A variety of spectrum re-use plans can be selected to cover the signal footprint with patterns of cells. For example, each cell can use one of four frequency sub-bands, and a fifth subband can be used for gateways (connections to the public network or to provide wideband links to dedicated users). By reusing the spectral bandwidth, a total network capacity in the range of 10 Gbps to 100 Gbps appears feasible. 1. The HALO Network Concept

Overview Many types of organizations schools, hospitals, doctors offices, and small to medium size businessesaround the world will benefit from the low pricing of broadband services provided by the HALO Network. Standard broadband protocols such as ATM and SONET will be adopted to interface the HALO Network as seamlessly as possible. The gateway to the HALO Network will provide access to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and to the Internet backbone for such services as the World Wide Web and electronic commerce. The gateway will provide to information content providers a network-wide access to a large population of end users.

Desirable Features of the HALO Network Some of the desirable features of the HALO Network are:

Seamless ubiquitous multimedia services Adaptation to end user environments Rapid provisioning of end users Rapid deployment of complete network solutions to cities of opportunity Total coverage of a metropolitan center and its surrounding communities on the first day Access to the consumer, SOHO, and content information markets Easy upgrades of the entire network Steady improvement of performance through routine maintenance Integration of technologies from terrestrial communications networks, wireless and wired Enhances terrestrial broadband networks; serves end users in the shadows of towers and relays Serves diffuse markets while allowing terrestrial networks to serve hot-spots Bandwidth on demand for efficient use of available spectrum.

Information created outside the service footprint is delivered to an end users terminal through terminals operated by businesses, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), or content providers within that region, and through the HALO Gateway (HG) directly connected to distant metropolitan areas via leased trunks. With a packet switch onboard the airplane, only two air links are required for terminal-toterminal communications via the node in the stratosphere. The HG is a portal serving the entire network. It allows system-wide access to content providers or advertisers, and it allows any end user to extend their communications beyond the HALO Network service area by connecting them to dedicated longdistance lines such as inter-metro optical fiber. High rainfall rates can reduce the effective data throughput of the link serving a given end user. Angel plans to ensure the maximum data rate more than 99.7% of the time. The link margin will be sufficient to provide an acceptable minimum data rate more than 99.9% of the time, and to limit outages to small areas (due to the interception of the signal path by very dense rain columns) to less than 0.1% of the time. Angel plans to locate the HG close to the HALO orbit center to reduce the slant range from its high-gain antenna to the aircraft and correspondingly its signal path len

HALO Network Architecture

At the apex of a wireless Cone of Commerce, the payload of the HALO aircraft serves as the hub of a star topology network for switching data packets between any two user terminals within the service footprint. A single hop with only two links is required, each link connecting the payload to an end user. The links are wireless, broadband and line of sight. Single link delays range from ~60 sec under the airplane to ~200 sec at the edge of the signal footprint.

gth through heavy rainfall. The link margin requirements have been assessed and achievable due thawing

high power available for the airborne segment of the network communications equipment HALO.AIRCRAFT The HALO Aircraft is under development and flight testing is expected to occur by mid-1998. The aircraft has been specially designed for the HALO Network with the Communications Payload Pod suspended from the underbelly of its fuselage. Angel assumes the "minimum look angle" (i.e., the elevation angle above the local horizon to the furthest point on the orbit as seen by the antenna of the premise equipment) is generally higher than 20 degrees. This value corresponds to subscribers at the perimeter of the service footprint. In contrast, cellular telephone designers assume that the line of sight from a customer to the antenna on the nearest base station is less than 1 degree. Angel chose such a high look angle to ensure that the antenna of each subscriber's premise equipment will very likely have access to a solid angle swept by the circling HALO Aircraft free of dense objects, and to ensure high availability of the service during heavy rainfall to all subscribers. The high look angle also allows the sharing of this spectrum with groundbased wireless networks since usually high-gain, narrow beams are used and the antenna beams of the HALO and ground-based networks will be separated in angle far enough to ensure a high degree of signal isolation.

FIELD OF VIEW

HALO Aircraft with Suspended Communications Payload The HALO Aircraft will fly above the metropolitan center in a circular orbit of five to eight nautical miles diameter. The Communications Payload Pod is mounted to a pylon under the fuselage. As the aircraft varies its roll angle to fly in t circular orbit, the Communications Payload Pod will pivot on the pylon to remain level with the ground.

COMMUNICATIONS

PAYLOAD

The HALO Network will use an array of narrow beam antennas on the HALO Aircraft to form multiple cells on the ground. Each cell covers a small geographic area, e.g., 4 to 8 square miles. The wide bandwidths and narrow beam widths within each beam or cell are achieved by using MMW frequencies. Small aperture antennas can be used to achieve small cells. For example, an antenna having a diameter of only one foot can provide a beam width of less than three degrees. One hundred dish antennas

in an efficient manner. An ATM-like packet switch on the HALO Aircraft provides the network switching capability to cross-connect all users within the coverage area as well as connections to other users through gateways. The elements in the communications payload are shown below. It consists of MMW transceivers, pilot tone transmitter, highspeed modems, SONET multiplexers, packet switch hardware and software, and associated ancillary hardware such as power supplies, processors, etc.

Functional Block Diagram of the Communications Payload

The major design options for antennas in the Communications Payload are to utilize either platform-fixed beams or earth-fixed beams. For the case of platform-fixed beams, each antenna would have a fixed field of view. The total field of view for the entire HALO Network would be the sum of these fields of view of the individual antennas. The network could initially have a small footprint and as demands on the HALO services increase, additional antennas could be added to the Communications Payload. This results in a modular design, readily adaptable for growth. Platform-fixed beams are simpler to construct generally, but require the "handoffs" between beams to be accomplished by the packet switching equipment as the beams "sweep" across the ground with the movement of the aircraft. However, the cost and performance penalties for frequently changing the virtual path through the packet switch may be appreciable. An alternative is to electronically steer the beams so they remain "fixed" on the ground as the aircraft moves. This result in more electronic and physical complexity for the antennas, but this may be a good trade-off to make since the burden on the packet switch and its

as can be easily carried by the HALO Aircraft to create one hundred or more cells throughout the service area. If lensed antennas are utilized, wider beams can be created by combining beams through each lens aperture, and with multiple feeds behind each lens multiple beams can be formed by each compound lens. If 850 MHz of spectrum is assumed, then a minimum capacity of one full-duplex OC-1 (51.84 Mbps) channel is available per cell. For example, a single platform reusing 850 MHz of spectrum in 100 cells would provide the equivalent of two, OC48 fiber optic rings. Higher capacities are possible by increasing the number of cells. By using Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology with over-theair dynamic bandwidth allocation, this capacity can be shared by multiple users

network management software would be greatly reduced. These trade-offs are still being assessed. For the case of earth-fixed beams, each antenna would have a wider field of view than the sum of the beams in that antenna since each beam can be steered in all directions. Each beam could be capable of steering throughout the HALO footprint, or could be assigned a smaller portion.

the signal to an L-band IF and provides subsequent amplification and processing Before outputting the signal to the NIU. Although the MMW transceiver is broadband, it typically will only process a single 40 MHz channel at any one time. The particular channel and frequency is determined by the NIU.

Functional Block Diagram of the Subscriber Equipment

The NIU interfaces to the RU via a coax pair which transmits the L-band TX and RX signals between the NIU and the RU. The NIU comprises an L-band tuner and down converter, a high-speed (up to 60 Mbps) demodulator, a high-speed modulator, multiplexers and demultiplexers, and data, telephony and video interface electronics. Each user terminal will provide access to data at rates up to 51.84 Mbps each way. In some applications, some of this bandwidth may be used to incorporate spread spectrum coding to improve performance against interference (in this case, the user information rate would be reduced). The NIU equipment can be identical to that already developed for LMDS and other broadband services. This reduces the cost of the HALO Network services to the consumer since there would be minimal cost to adapt the LMDS equipment to this application and we could take advantage of the high volume expected in the other services. Also, the HALO RU can be very close in functionality to the RU in the other services (like LMDS) since the primary difference is the need for a tracking function for the antenna. The electronics for the RF data signal would be identical if the same frequency band is utilized.

SUBSCRIBER UNITS A block diagram describing the CPE (and BPE) is shown below. It entails three major sub-groups of hardware: The RF Unit (RU) which contains the MMW Antenna and MMW Transceiver; the Network Interface Unit (NIU); and the application terminals such as PCs, telephones, video servers, video terminals, etc. The RU consists of a small dual-feed antenna and MMW transmitter and receiver which is mounted to the antenna. An antenna tracking unit uses a pilot tone transmitted from the Communications Payload to point the antenna toward the airborne platform. The MMW transmitter accepts an L-band (950 - 1950 MHz) IF input signal from the NIU, translates it to MMW frequencies, amplifies the signal using a power amplifier to a transmit power level of 100 - 500 mW of power and feeds the antenna. The MMW receiver couples the received signal from the antenna to a Low Noise Amplifier (LNA), down converts

Conclusion:

The HALO Network can provide wireless broadband communications services. The feasibility of this network is reasonably assured due to a convergence of technological advancements. The key enabling technologies at hand include GaAs (Gallium Arsenide) RF modules operating at MMW frequencies, ATM/SONET technology, digital signal processing of wideband signals, video compression, ultra-dense memory modules, lightweight aircraft technology including composite airframes and small fanjets capable of operating reliably at low Mach and low Reynolds numbers. These technologies are available, to a great extent, from vendors targeting commercial markets. The HALO Network is predicated on the successful integration of these technologies to offer communications services of high quality and utility to small and medium sized businesses at reasonable prices. The regulatory climates of the FAA and the FCC are favorable, though the political clout of satellite companies is formidable.

While a variety of broadband access modalities are promising for the U.S. market, the HALO Network may be a winner for a "green field" deployment, especially in a region where the existing infrastructure is not amenable to an upgrade or retrofit, ala xDSL. The HALO Network will be better suited than satellites to delivering broadband services to major cities, if forced to compete directly. On the other hand, the HALO Network can be a valuable asset to satellite operators by either offering backhauling of "Cone of Commerce" traffic, seamlessly extending next-generation mobile services to the city from the surrounding rural areas, enhancing broadband services as a "concentrator," or by enhancing local content.