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Airspan advances Air-to-Ground Communications Platform with Strato-Twin resulting from ARIA EndAP Program award

Airspan Communications Limited, a subsidiary of Airspan Networks Holdings LLC (“Airspan”), today announced it had been awarded £2.3 million to research and develop “Strato-Twin” - an AI-enabled digital twin for designing, simulating and optimizing High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) communications networks. Strato-Twin is being funded under the Enduring Atmospheric Platforms (EndAP) program of ARIA, the UK’s Advanced Research + Invention Agency, at Airspan’s UK R&D center of excellence for Air-to-Ground communications solutions, including HAPS and drones.

Airspan’s Strato-Twin integrates models of HAPS aircraft, communications payloads, atmospheric conditions, ground infrastructure and user devices to evaluate coverage, capacity, interference and connectivity across 4G, 5G and future 6G networks. It will help optimize constellation size, flight positioning, antenna beams, backhaul and payload size, weight and power (SWaP) constraints. By combining simulation with real-world flight data, Strato-Twin is designed to reduce development costs, guide flight trials, and support future HAPS deployment decisions.

The platform also connects technical performance with network economics. Strato-Twin will assess cost per square mile, cost per user, break-even times and revenue opportunities, including a mobile operator neutral-host wholesale model in which shared HAPS infrastructure could serve multiple mobile operators. Its economic model evaluates aircraft, payload and ground-infrastructure CAPEX alongside operating, energy, maintenance, staffing, spectrum and backhaul costs.

Rather than focusing on a single aircraft or payload, Strato-Twin evaluates the end-to-end service delivery capability of a constellation of HAPS aircraft, capable of providing nation-scale 4G and 5G services to augment and in-fill coverage and capacity of mobile operator networks. This allows Airspan and other program participants to understand how platform performance, including energy generation and conservation technologies like next generation solar cells, wireless and optical power-beaming, and atmospheric energy harvesting, communications payloads, spectrum, terrestrial and stratospheric coverage, network architecture and operating economics interact before committing to costly physical deployment.

“HAPS constellations with optimized communications payloads will offer an economically attractive alternative to low Earth orbit satellite direct-to-device services, for extending mobile coverage and adding capacity,” said Paul Senior, CTO at Airspan Networks. “Strato-Twin will help us test that proposition by bringing aircraft, communications payloads, spectrum, ground infrastructure and economics into one model. We will evaluate complete system designs before flight and refine and validate the models using real-world data as the programme develops. This builds on Airspan’s proven ATG experience as we extend a common technology foundation across HAPS, drones and other airborne applications.

Rico Chandra, Programme Director for Enduring Atmospheric Platforms at ARIA, said, “This research expands the UK’s leadership in high-altitude platforms to become the place where this industry is designed, built, and scaled. Getting there means backing bold ideas, from fixed-wing solar aircraft to designs nobody predicted, including aircraft that fly on spinning wings instead of propellers.”

With its ATG technology already deployed at scale with Gogo in the US for inflight connectivity, Airspan is now extending that experience across HAPS, drones and Advanced Air Mobility. Strato-Twin will provide a development and validation environment as Airspan evolves its ATG technology toward a more converged airborne communications architecture, using common 3GPP radio, networking, software and AI-enabled capabilities across different platforms, altitudes and missions.

Airspan plans to work with HAPS platform developers, payload teams, mobile operators and other EndAP participants to incorporate relevant data, constraints, and test results as Strato-Twin evolves, helping validate the model against real-world platform and communications requirements.