A Traffic-Aware QoS-Energy Consumption Tradeoff Study for Integrated 6G TN & NTNs

arXiv:2609.22288v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by the Hypercell concept, we extend BLASTER to investigate the trade-off between network quality of service (QoS) and terrestrial energy consumption in integrated terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks. We compare one low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite at 600 km with 1-, 4-, and 9-high-altitude platform station (HAPS) deployments at 20 km under a 24-hour traffic profile. Increasing the number of HAPS improves traffic offloading and enables additional terrestrial base station shutdowns. The 9-HAPS configuration reduces terrestrial energy consumption by 34.1% over the full day, compared with 26.0% for LEO. At the same QoS, the 9-HAPS configuration achieves 20% additional terrestrial energy savings relative to LEO, while substantially improving cell-edge throughput.