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Projecte llegit

Títol: HAPS for Emergency Support and Wildfire Coverage

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: GARCÍA LOZANO, MARIO

Departament: TSC

Títol: HAPS for Emergency Support and Wildfire Coverage

Data inici oferta: 27-01-2026     Data finalització oferta: 27-09-2026


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    DG ENG AERO/SIS TEL
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: Fora UPC    
 
        Supervisor/a extern: Samanta Simón Bernabeu
        Institució/Empresa: Airbus
        Titulació del Director/a: Enginyeria superior en Aeronàutica
 
Paraules clau:
HAPS, TETRA, Emergency communications, Wildfire, RESCAT, Link budget, Stratospheric platform, Rural coverage
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
1. General Objective
To design and evaluate a communications system embarked on a HAPS platform to support Fire
Brigade operations in wildfire suppression, combining forest fire monitoring functions with the
provision of communications coverage in rural or hard-to-access areas, as well as defining the
emergency plan and protocols for service activation.

2. Specific Objectives
' Analysis of the operational needs of the service in accordance with mission requirements:
response time, coverage range, number of simultaneous users, availability, and integration
with existing systems.
' Definition of the communications architecture embarked on the HAPS, including feeder and
user links, on-board processing systems, and the interface with the terrestrial network.
' Comparison of communication solutions: private 5G network vs. Agnet/TETRA.
' Technical and operational feasibility study, including:
' Development of an emergency plan and operational protocols, including:
' Assessment of the potential impact of the system on the efficiency and safety of firefighting
operations, through simulated scenarios and performance indicators related to coverage
improvement and response time.

3. Methodology and Planned Activities
' Collection and synthesis of technical and operational requirements (with support from Fire
Brigade contacts).
' Conceptual design of the communications system architecture and the associated
information flow.
' Technical simulations and calculations:
' Performance comparison between private 5G networks and Agnet/TETRA: equipment
requirements, interoperability, and latency.
' Design of the emergency plan and activation procedures, including prior configuration
decisions and authorization requirements.

4. Expected Results
' Preliminary technical design of the embarked communications system.
' Feasibility report including key parameters.
' Complete emergency plan with operational workflow
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
Wildfire suppression in mountainous terrain is hindered by the weaknesses of terrestrial emergency-communication networks, which suffer coverage shadows caused by the relief itself and risk losing their own ground infrastructure to the very fire they are meant to support. Developed in collaboration with Airbus and framed around the Catalan public-safety network RESCAT, this thesis studies the feasibility of a solar-powered High-Altitude Platform Station (HAPS), operating in the stratosphere at 20 km, acting as a communications and monitoring relay during these emergencies. Catalonia is the case study, but the resulting architecture and methodology are intended to transfer to other regions with similar terrain and infrastructure constraints.

Starting from a set of use cases describing how ground crews, command centres and the platform interact during a wildfire, the work derives a traceable set of functional requirements and carries out a trade-off analysis to select the aerial platform, the tactical communication protocol and the optical sensing technology. A fixed-wing solar aircraft is chosen over a stratospheric balloon for its persistence over the fire-prone region, TETRA over LTE/5G for its ridge diffraction, smoke penetration and low size, weight and power, and a dual-band long-wave-infrared plus visible payload for day and night operation through smoke. The resulting architecture is then developed down to the sizing of each radio-frequency component of the payload.

The design is verified through a suite of MATLAB simulations covering the RF link budget, TETRA channel capacity, the DC power budget, Doppler shift, end-to-end latency and geographic coverage over both synthetic and real terrain. At the 45 km design radius the link closes in both directions, but the downlink does so with only a few decibels of margin under the baseline terminal and antenna assumptions; that margin is sensitive to realistic terminal-orientation, body-coupling and antenna-mounting uncertainties, so 45 km is best read as a baseline objective rather than a robustly guaranteed radius, with comfortable margin available at shorter ranges or with higher-power terminals. Three TETRA carriers meet the RESCAT grade-of-service target for sixty concurrent users, and the tactical payload stays within a strict stratospheric power budget. A dedicated line-of-sight analysis confirms the central premise of the work: at 20 km altitude, terrain shadowing, the dominant limitation of ground-based repeaters, is not a significant factor even over mountainous profiles, while Doppler shift and latency remain comfortably within budget.

The results support a carefully scoped statement of technical viability at this baseline, and identify the thin downlink margin, together with the amplifier's low backed-off efficiency, as the main items requiring refinement or a more capable platform before the concept is pursued further.

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