A Balloon-Based UAV-Aided Non-Terrestrial Sectorized Network for Post Disaster Cellular Coverage: A Dynamic Environment Perspective

With the advancements in low-earth orbit (LEO) constellations, modern aerial platforms (APs), sector antennas, and device technologies, it is now becoming feasible to provide aerial platform-based cellular network (APCN) as an efficient and easy-to-deploy solution for post-disaster internet recovery. Similar to the terrestrial networks (TNs), sector access antennas have a huge potential for their usage in APs, such as tethered balloons, to provide a wide coverage and high-speed internet connectivity in disaster areas. However, in this paper, we show that many significant challenges remain in their commercial deployments which have received less attention so far. For instance, as the main cause of other challenges, by providing realistic 3D network simulations, we show that sectorized antenna-based APCNs suffer from inherent motions and vibrations of floating AP topologies, which causes moving and dynamic holes in the coverage and thus, confirms that the design of these APCNs is much more complicated than fixed TNs. To this end, by providing an easy-to-read brief review of existing aerospace post-disaster solutions, we show the superiority of APCNs which can bring several key benefits over the existing topologies, and then technically discuss its various challenges and open problems that need to be addressed before they can be deployed at a large scale.