Japan's first trial service aimed at commercializing HAPS, the flying base station, has been successfully completed. Using Sceye's stratospheric communications platform, the trial confirmed extended flight endurance over Japan and validated communications between the ground and smartphones, drones and HAPS, as well as edge computing.
Sceye's HAPS departed from New Mexico, United States, crossed the Pacific and reached airspace over Japan. It flew more than approximately 15,000 km over about 13 days, maintaining extended flight endurance offshore from Cape Muroto, Japan, while confirming that it could keep its position within a 5-km radius inside the designated test area.
In communications trials between ground-based smartphones around Muroto, Kochi Prefecture, and HAPS, the 4G LTE-equivalent base station mounted on HAPS was connected via a ground gateway to SoftBank's core network. The trials confirmed stable voice calls, SMS, high-capacity data communications and emergency alert email delivery.
Communications trials between HAPS and drones confirmed that remotely controlled autonomous flight, the transmission of location data and video transmission could be carried out reliably. Potential use cases include assessing damage after disasters, logistics, surveillance and infrastructure inspections.
The world's first technical validation of edge computing was conducted by mounting a processing server on HAPS. Response processing within HAPS took approximately 68 milliseconds round trip, reducing latency by more than 40% compared with routing through the cloud. The results indicate the potential to combine wide-area coverage with low latency.