A new means for providing wireless communication has been currently proposed. It is based on aerial vehicle known asHigh Altitude Platform or Stratospheric Platforms (SPF). The SPF will be operated at an altitude of 17-22 km above theground. Therefore, the channel condition may be different compared with those of the conventional terrestrial orsatellite wireless channel. In this paper, the channel propagation characteristic of such a system is firstly investigated bymeans of ray tracing algorithm. We emphasize our investigation in a typical urban environment, in which the mobileusers mostly exist. We developed building block model for simulation based on building height distribution, which isobtained from measurement inside Tokyo. As a result, propagation loss model and Ricean channel parameter for theSPF channel is reported in different scenarios. By using this result we then estimate the required transmitted power ofSPF to serve the mobile users in a several transmission rate that is used in IMT-2000 services. Finally, an evaluation ofBER of IMT-2000 link is performed in order to estimate the system level performance. From this evaluation, the maincontribution of this paper is to clearly show the critical limitations of both power requirement as well as system levelperformance of mobile communication IMT-2000 by using the concept of the SPF. |