Maritime Coverage Analysis in Altitude-Controlled Balloons with Wind-Dependent Trajectories

This paper proposes a framework to analyze the maritime coverage performance during the floating time of altitude-controlled balloon-type high-altitude platform stations, simply called balloons, experiencing wind-dependent threedimensional trajectories. Our key idea is to use the trajectory analysis tool of the air mass based on the real weather data to model the wind-dependent trajectories of balloons, characterized in our network system. This key idea enables our framework to analyze the realistic system-level maritime coverage performance and support optimizing the altitude control strategy of each balloon, which can adaptively use winds. Our simulation results showed that free-floating balloons resulted in uncovered or outage areas in the Pacific Ocean in Japan, even in balloons released from the eleven locations and four altitudes. Our simulation results also suggested that the optimally altitude-controlled balloons achieved 25% smaller outage areas than the free-floating balloons. Supplementary Material File (20251007_tmc_ntt_hirai_v02.pdf) - Download - 2.91 MB Information & Authors Information Version history Copyright This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Authors Metrics & Citations Metrics Article Usage 146views 135downloads Citations Download citation Takeshi Hirai, Tatsuya Iizuka, Natsuki Fukui, et al. Maritime Coverage Analysis in Altitude-Controlled Balloons with Wind-Dependent Trajectories. Authorea. 06 November 2025. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.176244782.27727354/v1 DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.176244782.27727354/v1 If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download. For more information or tips please see 'Downloading to a citation manager' in the Help menu.