Link Analysis Between an Airborne Mobile Station and a Terrestrial GSM Network

Conference: SCC 2017 - 11th International ITG Conference on Systems, Communications and Coding
02/06/2017 - 02/09/2017 at Hamburg, Germany

Proceedings: SCC 2017

Pages: 6Language: englishTyp: PDF

Personal VDE Members are entitled to a 10% discount on this title

Authors:
Justavino C., Rodrigo A.; Gruenheid, Rainer; Bauch, Gerhard (Institute of Communications, Hamburg University of Technology, 21073 Hamburg, Germany)
Wolff, Florian; Heide, Stefan von der (Siemens Convergence Creators GmbH Co KG, 21079 Hamburg, Germany)

Abstract:
The use of mobile phones during long-haul flights is becoming more popular as airlines equip their aircrafts with onboard GSM and LTE base stations. Right now, this increasing number of aircraft users is restricted to the base station installed in the airplane. However, there are plans to use terrestrial mobile networks as an alternative to onboard base stations to serve aircraft users for certain parts of the flight route. Investigations about the interaction between flying mobile users and a terrestrial mobile network are scarce. In this work, the connection between a user on an airplane and an existing terrestrial GSM network non-optimized for airborne communication is analyzed. Several scenarios are investigated to determine if an onboard GSM user flying at an altitude between 3000 and 10000 meters can establish a connection with a ground GSM base station considering physical and higher layer requirements.