Energy Harvesting in High-Altitude Platform Station-Enabled Sensor Networks

High-altitude platform station (HAPS) systems are becoming crucial facilitators for future wireless communication networks, enhancing connectivity across all vertical communication layers, including small Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices, terrestrial users, and aerial devices. In the context of the widely recognized vertical heterogeneous network (VHetNet) architecture, HAPS systems can provide service to both aerial and ground users. However, integrating HAPS systems as a core element in the VHetNet architecture presents a considerable energy challenge, marking a prominent constraint for their operation. Driven by this challenge, we introduce an energy harvesting (EH) strategy tailored for HAPS systems, enabling an HAPS system to gather energy from another HAPS system, which is not constrained by energy limitations. To assess the performance capabilities of the proposed model, we derive outage probability (OP) and ergodic capacity (EC) and verify them by using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations. Moreover, we explore the system in terms of throughput. The findings reveal that harnessing the full potential of EH stands as a viable approach to meet the energy demands of HAPS systems.