Aviation Communications: Transformative Expansion, UAVs, and Air-Ground Channel Modeling

Abstract

The year 1970 recorded nearly 8 million passenger flights in the world. By 2018, this had grown to over 45 million passenger flights (~1/3 in the USA). If we add to this number flights for private aircraft, freight, experimental, and military aircraft, and rapidly growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the total number of aircraft flying this year will exceed 50 million (>130,000 flights/day!). Coordinating all these flights for safety and efficiency is termed air traffic management (ATM). Effective ATM requires rapid and highly reliable aviation communications. Since current ATM communication systems will reach capacity and will not have the required reliability in the near future, researchers worldwide are actively investigating new aviation communications. In the USA, NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate has several programs for integrating new aircraft and UAVs into the National Airspace System. Companies such as Uber, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are also investigating UAV use, and of course, aircraft developers such as Boeing and Airbus are conducting research on UAVs and advanced ATM for their aircraft as well. In this talk we address aviation communications and in particular the recent rise in use of UAVs (also commonly termed “drones”). After an introduction and some comparison of UAVs to piloted aircraft and terrestrial vehicles, we focus on a key element in any radio communication link: the wireless channel. The wireless channel is often the most challenging impediment to reliable communications. Because of this, wireless channels have been studied for decades, and are a continuing topic of communications research for new applications, settings, and frequency bands. We compare the air-ground (AG) wireless channel to other familiar channels, and describe some of our recent work with NASA on the AG channel. This includes measurements and models for AG channel path loss, delay dispersion, and airframe shadowing in two frequency bands. Some new results for dynamic channel characteristics such as spatial correlation and statistical stationarity distance are also presented. We also briefly describe current work in the millimeter wave bands for short range airport applications.

Biography

David W. Matolak received the B.S. degree from The Pennsylvania State University, the M.S. degree from The University of Massachusetts, and the Ph.D. degree from The University of Virginia, all in electrical engineering. He has over 25 years’ experience in communication system research, development, and deployment, with private companies, government institutions, and academia, including AT&T Bell Labs, L3 Communication Systems, MITRE, and Lockheed Martin. He has over 230 publications, eight patents, has presented multiple invited papers and talks, and has won several awards. He was a professor at Ohio University (1999-2012), and since 2012 has been a professor of electrical engineering at the University of South Carolina. He has led multiple IEEE workshops and conference special sessions on current communications topics, and is an Associate Editor for two IEEE journals. Prof. Matolak is also a member of RTCA and ITU standards groups that are working on aviation communications. He is also a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, URSI, ASEE, and AIAA. His research interests are radio channel modeling and communication techniques for non-stationary fading channels.

A reception with refreshments will be held after the talk in Room 460 Clyde Building.