Characterization of a global 4G mobile communications network using the commercial aircraft network

• Autor(a) principal: Madruga, Ana Gisela Duarte
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/22221
• topic: Global communications network; Commercial aircrafts; LTE; Attenuation; Modelo de propagação; Propagation model; Rede de comunicações global; Aviação comercial; Atenuação; Modelo de propagação

The ever increasing demand for high data rates and mobility, at the same time with the lowest latency possible, comes as a motivation and inspiration for the writing of this dissertation. Besides terrestrial networks, another common way to communicate nowadays is via satellite networks; low Earth orbit satellites are the ones closer to the Earth, still, they are 800km away, requiring high energetic consumption. Routes used by commercial air traffic cover great part of the globe, with higher incidence in the most populated areas, namely North America, Europe and Eastern Asia. The main objective of this project is to prove that it would be possible to have a global coverage network or, at least, a network able to fulfil the needs of users located in the most populated regions, where air traffic is denser. Users would be able to communicate to any part of the world; the nearest aircraft gets the signal and, since they are organized as a mesh network, it travels from aircraft to aircraft until it reaches its final destination. LTE frequency bands have a great margin to operate without interfering with the frequencies used in aeronautical radio communication systems, as will be seen in Chapter 3. The work developed shows that the most favourable conditions regarding the maximum distances obtained to establish the communication will be to set up the proposed system using QPSK, a 1.4 MHz channel and transmission frequency should be 737 MHz. Thus, maximum attainable distance in rural scenario is 46.62 km.