ISBN 9783843956574

978-3-8439-5657-4, Reihe Elektrotechnik

Daniel M. Mielke
Robust Wireless Communications Through the Air-Ground Channel in C-Band

156 Seiten, Dissertation Universität Ulm (2025), Softcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

From a technical point of view, much of the communication infrastructure in today's aviation dates back to the beginning of the aviation age:

Analogue voice radio and very few digital systems are still the main drivers in air traffic management.

While this lack of modern high-throughput, robust, and cyber-secure data links is a significant, but not a fundamental problem in traditional manned aviation, it makes further automation of aviation or even unmanned aviation impossible.

Thus, to make unmanned aviation a reality, the development of new data links - called command and control links - is necessary.

The present dissertation contributes to this development as follows:

To get a good understanding of the air-ground communication channel, a comprehensive channel measurement campaign has been carried out in C-band using a jet aircraft.

The collected channel sounding data have been processed with a focus on the multi-path components, where, unlike some existing approaches, the detection and the tracking of multi-path components is split into two separated steps to save processing time.

A novel multi-path component tracking approach that is based on finding paths within a graph has been developed.

The outcome of this multi-path component tracking is used to validate the applied processing chain by estimating the position of the corresponding reflectors.

To represent the temporal evolution of the tracked multi-path components, a compact form has been developed, whose statistics are analysed by estimating the kernel density.

This kernel is then used to generate instances of a channel model.

Eventually, this channel modelling approach is used to simulate the transmission of several waveform configurations based on orthogonal frequency division multiplex, which could be used as a command and control link for unmanned air vehicles.