Modelling, Investigation, and Feasibility of Stratospheric Broadband mm-Wave 5G and beyond Networks for Aviation

Abstract

Recent advances in communication systems provide an enabling technology for aircraft connection and safety. A promising communication system that uses stratospheric platforms provides an efficient and improved communication performance and can be an efficient solution for establishing communication networks for aviation. Therefore, in this paper, a novel communication network based on stratospheric basestation (SB) is proposed to provide fifth-generation (5G) and beyond services for civil aviation aircrafts to improve global flight connectivity, control, and safety. The proposed aircraft–SB network is demonstrated, and its coverage geometry is modelled and investigated. As the 5G and beyond networks use millimeter wave frequency bands (mm-wave), the performance of different atmospheric losses including gaseous absorption, rain, and fog/cloud is analyzed to investigate the system’s practical feasibility at different 5G proposed frequencies ranging from 3.5 to 66 GHz through a flight model including three distinct stages which are takeoff/landing, climbing/descending, and cruise stages. Also, handover scenarios in the proposed aircraft–SB network are investigated and analyzed at the proposed 5G frequencies. In addition, the aircraft–SB 5G network is compared to the most recent low-Earth orbit (LEO) Internet satellites where the proposed system is expected to provide low latency, less atmospheric attenuation, longer aircraft–SB link duration, and very low handover rate.

An Adaptive Bidirectional Multibeam High-Altitude Platforms Aeronautical Telecommunication Network Using Dual Concentric Conical Arrays

“…Recently, the idea of using stratospheric high-altitude platform (HAP) [24] gains attention for aviation systems where the global wide coverage advantage of satellite systems at fixed station position could improve the system performance and help increase the data rates especially at millimeter wave (mm-wave) bands. HAPs fly at a quasistationary position of about 20 km high in the stratosphere and provides very wide coverage area approaching 1000 km diameter for ground receivers with very optimistic communication performance relative to both terrestrial cellular systems and satellites systems of any orbit altitude [24]- [28]. HAP can be utilized as a flying basestation to provide aircrafts with high-speed data connectivity and a network of HAPs can provide continuous coverage over oceanic and wide desert regions like satellite systems.…”

“…Therefore, HAP is expected to close the gap between different conventional ground and satellite ATNs and become the candidate of future high-speed Internet aeronautical network. On the other hand, at mm-wave bands, the communication link between aircrafts and HAP suffers from high atmospheric losses [24] and needs efficient radio resource management especially for the long-range connection between aircrafts and HAPs.…”

“…The communication environment between an aircraft and HAP is very attractive to build an efficient and high-speed network with minimal atmospheric and propagation losses especially for frequencies below 10 GHz [24]. This network can be further improved by adopting narrow-beam cellular communications between aircrafts and HAPs.…”

“…Table I displays typical parameters and their values for examining the system performance using the proposed array and beamforming technique for the HAP-ATN. As listed in this table, the atmospheric losses for higher mm-wave frequencies are great and therefore, it is recommended only to use these frequencies for inflight cases where the LOS is totally above clouds as the atmospheric losses are only 0.25 and 0.55 dB for the 28 and 39 GHz frequencies respectively [24] for a link distance of 340 km. One of the interesting features when establishing cellular HAP ATN is the self-shadowing of earth to the propagated waves which efficiently prevent the co-channel interference between HAP aeronautical cells.…”

An Efficient Adaptive and Steep-Convergent Sidelobes Simultaneous Reduction Algorithm for Massive Linear Arrays

“…Wireless communications and networks became an important part in our life and are essential for many fields and involved in various applications including mobile cellular networks, Internet of Things (IoT), radar, sonar, medical networks, aeronautical telecommunication networks (ATN), and many other wireless applications [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Therefore, developing wireless communications and networks represents a major objective for improving the quality of service (QoS) and system capacity required by the higher data rates services (and future 6G and other more advance networks) [8].…”