In-Flight Performance Analysis of a Wideband Radio Using SDR for Avionic Applications

Along with the increase in the number of passengers, aviation industry also needs to be adapted to the increasing demands of new services and applications. As one of the leading features of the Industry 4.0 era, maintaining a constant and high quality internet connectivity in-flight (also known as the In-Flight Entertainment Connectivity, IFEC) is one of the most demanded services. Among the explored solutions, the Wideband Radio (WBR), first presented in 2017 as a module in the Multi-Mode Software Defined Avionic Radio (MM-SDAR), is the avionic module that addresses the ever-increasing demand for the IFEC application. Based on the Adaptive Coding and Modulation (ACM) scheme, this Software Defined Avionic Module (SDAM) promises to deliver an optimum data rate regarding the real-time condition of the transmission channels. Moreover, as an SDR-based module, it is reconfigurable and could be implemented in an IMA-compatible (Integrated Modular Avionics) fashion in the future RF avionic architecture. In order to evaluate the operation of this WBR module in real flight conditions, it was flight tested in 2017, and positive results were obtained. This paper aims to provide an analysis of the in-flight performance (with Bit Error Rate - BER mode and video streaming mode) of the WBR, and concentrates on demonstrating the capacity and the operation of the ACM mechanism in a complex environment. With a transmission power of 10 W and a bandwidth of 675 kHz, the maximum slant range of the WBR during these flights reached 5 NM, and the ACM mechanism helped the system maintain an average throughput of around 360 kbit/s.