Abstract
Stratospheric platform (SP) is a new technique for providing mobile and data communications and is capable to add many advantages to the users compared to conventional terrestrial and satellite systems. A very competing problem of this emerging system is the positional instability of SP which affects the system performance. In this paper, one main problem of SP positional instabilities-which is the rotation drift-is described and analyzed and its impact on the call handover in cellular systems is also investigated. The total handover due to both user mobility and platform positional instability is explained and determined. In addition, an expression for the number of handed calls is deduced which has been shown as function of user density, distribution, platform angular shift due to rotation, cell geometry, and number of active calling users. The analysis of this number shows the serious effects of the rotational motion instability on the system performance.