Abstract
Wireless avionics intra-communication (WAIC) refers to a wireless communication system among electronic components (e.g., sensors and actuators) that are integrated or installed in an aircraft and it is proposed to replace heavy and expensive wired communication cables. Recently, the use of a frequency band (4.2–4.4 GHz) for the WAIC (so-called, WAIC band) has been approved by international telecommunication union (ITU). Accordingly, several existing wireless protocols such as IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.15 are being considered as candidate techniques for the intra-avionics sensor network. In this paper, we perform a real field experiment to investigate wireless channel characteristics in intra-avionics sensor networks at the WAIC bands by a software-defined radio platform (universal software radio peripheral, USRP) and self-produced monopole antennas for the WAIC band. Through the experiment, we validated the feasibility of IEEE 802.11 protocol for the intra-avionics sensor network at the WAIC band in real aircraft environments. Furthermore, based on the measurement data, we evaluated the bit error rate (BER) performance of multiple antenna techniques where we considered the maximum ratio combining (MRC) for the multi-antenna receiver and the space-time block coding (STBC) for the multi-antenna transmitter.
Highlights
Wireless avionics intra-communications (WAIC) refers to radio communication systems that interconnect avionics components installed in an aircraft [1].Wireless technologies to enable communications outside an aircraft have been broadly investigated and developed to support various necessary functionalities such as aircraft-ground control, inter-aircraft communications, and radar
We obtained 100 samples per each measurement and average them to reduce the effect of white noise, given by
In our context, communication regions mean an area where reliable wireless packet transmissions are feasible between any points in each region under the transmit power constraint (≤20 dBm). (The power constraint under 20 dBm was sufficient in our experiments since we considered intra-avionics sensor network environments.) For example, reliable wireless packet transmissions were feasible between P0 and P2 since they were in the same Region 2
Summary
Wireless avionics intra-communications (WAIC) refers to radio communication systems that interconnect avionics components (e.g., sensors and actuators) installed in an aircraft [1].Wireless technologies to enable communications outside an aircraft have been broadly investigated and developed to support various necessary functionalities such as aircraft-ground control, inter-aircraft communications, and radar. Wireless avionics intra-communications (WAIC) refers to radio communication systems that interconnect avionics components (e.g., sensors and actuators) installed in an aircraft [1]. Contrary to this, applying wireless networks (e.g., intra-avionics sensor networks) inside the aircraft has been relatively less highlighted due to the concerns about wireless communication on reliability, safety, and security, compared to wired ones [2]. Sensors 2019, 19, 1294 reliability and robustness) of the aircraft can be sufficiently satisfied through wireless networks, which results in the overall weight reduction of the aircraft (e.g., removing the wired cables) [3]. Statistics show that wireless networks will lead to 15% lighter designs than existing ones in terms of overall weight and will bring 12% increase in fuel efficiency in the aircrafts [4]. International telecommunication union (ITU) decided to allocate a frequency band from 4.2 GHz to
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