Total Cost of Ownership Optimization for Direct Air-to-Ground System Design

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical framework to optimize the deployment and total cost of ownership of a direct air-to-ground communication network for European airspace, considering capacity, cost, and network parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analytical approach for ground station deployment and TCO optimization in DA2GC networks with multi-user beamforming and hybrid antennas.

Findings

Optimal number of ground stations for coverage

Cost-effective antenna array configurations

Trade-offs between network parameters and TCO

Abstract

Aircraft cabin is one of the last venues without mobile broadband. Considering future 5G applications and connectivity requirements, direct air-to-ground communications (DA2GC) is the only technique which can provide high capacity and low latency backhaul link for aircraft via a direct communication link. To this end, we propose an analytical framework to investigate the ground station deployment problem for DA2GC network employing multi-user beamforming with dual-polarized hybrid DA2GC antenna arrays. In addition, the proposed framework is utilized to analyze and optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the DA2GC network to provide coverage for European airspace. We present the interplay between different network parameters: the number of ground stations, array size, transmit power and bandwidth, and TCO optimizing deployment parameters are calculated in order to satisfy capacity requirements. At the end, we show that, depending on the cost of different network resources, a terrestrial cellular network can be designed to cover the whole European airspace with limited number of ground stations with a certain array size, i.e., 900 and 361 antenna elements for ground station and air station, respectively.