ADS‐B aided robust relay selection for cooperative communications in aircraft approach

Abstract

SummaryThe ground‐to‐air communications in the aircraft approach stage suffer from multipath fading. We propose to combat this problem using cooperative communication technique. The relay selection problem is formulated to minimize the spectrum cost while preserving the signal‐to‐noise‐ratio (SNR) outage requirement of the approaching aircraft. By leveraging the position and velocity information in the automatic dependent surveillance‐broadcast messages, the average channel gains can be derived with uncertainty sets based on the Ricean channel model. Because the outage probability of the received SNR is intractable, we transform the outage constraint into a simple but efficient reliability requirement. The formulated problem is a mixed integer nonlinear optimization problem, with robustness in the worst‐case average SNR. A robust greedy relay selection algorithm is proposed as a solution, whereby a Kalman filter based trace prediction algorithm is adopted to determine the order of relays. Simulation results are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.