During a large-scale natural disaster or unexpected events, the terrestrial telecommunications become stretched, overloaded or totally destroyed in several cases. In these scenarios, a robust and capable emergency communication system is required to guarantee efficient communication to public safety agencies during the emergency phases. Airborne communication network systems have been recently studied for the provision of wireless communication services in those scenarios and it is a promising candidate for rapidly deployable and resilient emergency networks. However, the choice of communication technologies from aerial platforms is a challenging issue due to their payload capacity constraints. In this paper, we present a realistic Hybrid Aerial-Terrestrial Network (HATN) architecture based on the deployment of 4G-LTE Remote Radio Head (RRH) embedded on Helikite platforms and investigate their applicability and performance characteristics in emergency and unexpected scenarios. We present an adapted simulation model for the analysis of HATN. Our results confirm that the proposed architecture is able to provide high-capacity IP data HATN suitable for many forms of multimedia delivery.
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