Caching in the Air: High Altitude Platform Stations for Urban Environments

Due to the evolution in communications technologies and antennas, as well as advances in solar panel efficiency, High Altitude Platforms (HAPS) have been recently considered as a promising aerial network component, to support Radio Access Networks (RANs). Through their directional antenna they can activate beams and provide coverage to up to 1.5 km radius ground area. In this work, we consider a HAPS equipped with a Multi Access Edge Computing (MEC) server, which provides caching capabilities. The HAPS is used to off-load content requests. We analyse an urban environment scenario, as well as the effects of the simultaneous activation of beams in different areas. Results demonstrate that the HAPS is a suitable solution to bring additional capacity to the RAN and highlight that the provided performance strictly depends on the traffic demand profile of the covered portion of RAN.