Sky Station Stratospheric Telecommunications System, a high speed low latency switched wireless network

摘要

Sky Station is a novel telecommunications network which employs a proprietary stratospheric platform technology to provide broadband wireless communications services around the world. ^The stratospheric platform is a super-pressurized helium-filled solar/fuel-cell powered airship with enough payload and power capacity to support all of a metropolitan area's broadband communications requirements. ^The Sky Station airship uses propulsion and thermal control to keep it stationary for no less than five years at 21 km altitude. ^Through the stratospheric infrastructure, the Sky Station stratospheric telecommunications system (STS) will offer fixed or transportable full duplex E-1 uplink and 10 Mbps downlink services to the desktop or laptop. ^This is sufficient to support such multimedia services as video-telephony, low-cost video-conferencing, and high-speed Internet connectivity. ^The built-in security measure provides wire-line equivalent privacy (WEP) to insure high degree of privacy of communications. ^The Sky Station STS employs an end-to-end ATM architecture using UNI 4.0 and PNNI signaling protocols and can support AAL5 ABR/VBR and CBR services. ^The first-generation SSI STS will have a capacity of 7 Gbps between the user terminals and the STS platform and another 4.1 Gbps of highspeed trunk links between the platform and the ground stations for PSTN and Internet connectivity. ^(Author)