Centre for High Altitude Platform Applications

What are High Altitude Platforms?

High altitude platforms (HAPs) are aircraft, airships or balloons situated in the stratosphere (from 17 to 22 km above the ground) and can provide applications over regional areas of coverage.

They can be used to deliver a variety of services, including wireless communications, environmental monitoring and atmospheric science research. They can provide real-time monitoring of ground-based infrastructure or environmental features. 

HAPs have the potential capability to serve a large number of users, who could be situated either in crowded cities or sparsely-populated rural areas. Their high altitude, longevity, and autonomous control allows them to be deployed in hard to reach areas, enabling new studies of the earth’s atmosphere to be undertaken.

Projects

HAPS Architectures that Deliver Resilient Sovereign Communications, AI and Computing (HARC)

Funded by the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency (ARIA) Enduring Atmospheric Platforms programme, this project aims to establish High-Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS) as a resilient, sovereign foundation for next-generation 5G/6G communications. By integrating HAPS into a flexible 3D network architecture that combines terrestrial systems, HAPS constellations, and LEO satellites, the initiative overcomes the limitations of single-platform operation.

Leveraging breakthroughs in non-terrestrial networks (NTN), distributed MIMO (DMIMO), optical transport, and AI-driven management, the project delivers the first UK-designed end-to-end HAPS-enabled communications architecture.

Critically, the design offers a commercially viable pathway that meets stringent 20 kg / 300 W payload constraints and applications beyond communications such as Public Protection and Disaster Relief.

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