Multimodal Large Language Model Enabled Robust Beamforming for HAP Downlink Communications

Abstract

Small changes in high altitude platform (HAP) attitude can cause significant deviations in HAP downlink beam directions, thereby severely degrading HAP downlink communication performance. In this paper, we develop a multimodal large language model (LLM) enabled beamforming framework to achieve robust HAP downlink communications.Specifically, we design a vision-language LLM (VL-LLM) that learns from multivariate flight telemetry to forecast short-term HAP attitudes under platform shaking and support delay-aware proactive beam steering.We design an offline forecast-error calibration procedure to obtain upper bounds on forecast errors and improve the reliability of proactive analog beam steering.Based on the attitude forecasts, we proactively update the analog beamformer and propose a QoS-driven beamforming and admission method with a lightweight feasibility-enforcement step to satisfy instantaneous transmit-power and QoS requirements.Simulation results indicate that the designed VL-LLM can accurately capture changes in the HAP attitude and the proposed beamforming method achieves a 22.1% higher user service ratio and a 12.5% higher sum-rate than representative baselines.The measured mean and p99 total latencies are 36.24 ms and 40.13 ms, respectively, supporting practical delay-aware deployment.