Serrano Yáñez-Mingot, PabloGramaglia, MarcoMancini, FrancescoChiraraviglio, LucaBianchi, Giuseppe2023-05-082023-05-082023-06-01IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, (2023), 22(6), pp.: 3165-3178.1536-1233https://hdl.handle.net/10016/37259The Google's Loon[TM] initiative aims at covering rural or underdeveloped areas via fleets of high-altitude balloons supporting LTE connectivity. But how effective and stable can be the coverage provided by a network deployed via propulsion-free balloons, floating in the sky, and only loosely controllable through altitude variations? To provide some insights on the relevant performance and trade-offs, in this paper we gather real-world data from publicly available flight tracking services, and we analyze coverage and service stability in three past deployment scenarios. Besides employing a variety of metrics related to spatial and temporal coverage, we also assess service continuity, by also leveraging recently proposed “meaningful availability” metrics. While our analyses show that balloons are certainly a cost-effective way to provide a better-than-nothing and delay-tolerant service, there is yet no empirical evidence that an increase in the number of overlapping balloons may be rewarded with a substantial performance increase - in other words, we suspect that guaranteeing coverage and service stability levels comparable to that of a terrestrial cellular network is a challenging goal.13eng© 2021 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.Digital divideUnmanned Aerial VehiclesUAVHigh Altitude Platform StationHAPsLoon serviceresearch articleInformáticaTelecomunicacioneshttps://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2021.3135976open access316563178IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING22AR/0000028960