A CDMA Based Approach for QoS Improvement in Intra-Aircraft Wireless Sensor Networks (IAWSN)

Abstract

<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">Aviation industry is striving to leverage the technological advancements in connectivity, computation and data analytics. Scalable and robust connectivity enables futuristic applications like smart cabins, prognostic health management (PHM) and AI/ML based analytics for effective decision making leading to flight operational efficiency, optimized maintenance planning and aircraft downtime reduction. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are gaining prominence on the aircraft for providing large scale connectivity solution that are essential for implementing various health monitoring applications like Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), Prognostic Health Management (PHM), etc. and control applications like smart lighting, smart seats, smart lavatory, etc. These applications help in improving passenger experience, flight operational efficiency, optimized maintenance planning and aircraft downtime reduction. Intra Aircraft WSNs (IAWSN) used for such applications are expected to provide robust and reliable communication performance. However, IAWSNs, when deployed, must co-exist with other wireless devices and networks based on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies. Sharing of the ISM frequency band (2.4 GHz) among these networks makes the co-existence problem more challenging and has a significant impact on the Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of throughput, latency and Packet Error Rate (PER) of IAWSN. In addition, they are subjected to additional electromagnetic interference from other electronic and avionic systems onboard aircraft. There are various channel management, priority-based scheduling and time-sharing techniques that are deployed currently to address the co-existence problem. However, these methods perform a trade-off among one or more operational parameters like channel bandwidth, number of nodes per channel, throughput, latency, PER, etc. of IAWSN. Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technique is a proven one in cellular networks for providing reliable interference free communication performance especially in large scale networks. This paper evaluates the feasibility of deploying CDMA for IEEE 802.15.4 based IAWSN onboard aircraft. A CDMA based communication schema is proposed and simulated for IAWSN operating as per IEEE 802.15.4 protocol. The communication performance of the CDMA based IAWSN is evaluated in comparison with the performance of a standard IEEE 802.15.4 protocol implementation in the presence of interference from the co-nodes of the IAWSN and Wi-Fi devices by analyzing the QoS parameters like signal to noise ratio (SNR), operational bandwidth, Bit-Error Rate (BER) and Process Gain through simulation. Simulations results are evaluated against the desired performance level for a reference use case application. Improvement opportunities are identified and areas for future research are proposed.</div></div>