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TopMotivation And Challenges
The ever-changing geographical environment of an aircraft and an increasing availability of different wireless services makes one wonder, what if such services can be accessed in real time?
This provided the motivation to develop a concept system and its hardware that would accommodate to the rapid changes, not just due to the aircraft location, but also to support the growth of services and industry evolution.
Figure 1 depicts the notional framework of opportunistic wireless data service that may be available for an aircraft in flight. At higher altitude the services may be more traditional and fixed, however on ground, the growing WiMAX and local area network services may be available to be accessed from the aircraft. The high-speed mobility of an aircraft adds additional challenges to the design of system physical layer, such as path loss and multi-Doppler spread (Medina et al., 2008; Erturk, Haque, & Arslan, 2010).
TopReview Of Literature
The desire for a universal and a reconfigurable terminal first appeared in the military area. The need for mobility and accessibility was the driving requirement. One of the early concept was a reconfigurable system appeared as an equipment called “SPEAKeasy” (Lackey & Upmal, 1995). The Software Communications Architecture (SCA) developed by the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) further fueled the growth of SDR (JTRS Enterprise, n.d.). JTRS aims to provide a family of digital, programmable, multiband, multimode, modular radios to alleviate communications interoperability problems. Finally the work of Mitola (1995), there is now a growing interest in reconfigurable terminals.