A General Framework for Airplane Air-to-Ground Communications in mmWave and Microwave Bands

TL;DR

This paper presents a flexible framework for airplane data offloading during descent using mmWave and microwave bands, optimizing power, bandwidth, and beamforming to maximize data transfer while minimizing interference.

Contribution

It introduces an adaptive offline optimization framework for airplane data offloading that accounts for interference constraints and varies transmission parameters based on descent position.

Findings

Up to 5 GB can be offloaded in microwave band during descent.

In mmWave band, up to 24 times more data can be offloaded compared to microwave.

Beamforming and power tuning are essential for mmWave performance.

Abstract

Airplane sensors and on-board equipment collect an increasingly large amount of maintenance data during flights that are used for airplane maintenance. We propose to download part of the data during airplane's descent via a cellular base station (BS) located at the airport. We formulate and solve an offline optimization problem to quantify how much data can be offloaded in a non-dedicated band while ensuring that the interference at the terrestrial BSs in the vicinity of the airport remains below a maximum allowable threshold. Our problem allows for adaptive tuning of transmit power, number of frequency channels to be used, and beamforming according to the position of the plane on the descent path. Our results show that during the last 5 minutes of descent, in the microwave band the plane can offload up to 5 GB of maintenance data in a 20~MHz band, while in the mmWave band the plane can offload up to 24 times more data in a 1~GHz band. Beamforming, power and bandwidth tuning are all crucial in maintaining a good performance in the mmWave band while in the microwave band, dynamic tuning of bandwidth does not improve the performance much.