Potential Future Aviation Communication Technologies

Aviation growth is occurring in all sectors of the industry: numbers of commercial passenger, freight, experimental, and especially unmanned flights are rising steadily. This requires advances in aeronautics as well as in air traffic management (ATM). Multiple organizations worldwide are working on research and development for future ATM, including NASA and the FAA, EuroControl, major airlines, aviation support industries, and academia. Three key elements underlying efficient ATM are communications, navigation, and surveillance (CNS). In this paper we focus on communications for future ATM. As part of a University Leadership Initiative project sponsored by NASA, we are investigating current and future communications technologies that can be applied to enhance ATM, specifically air traffic safety and efficiency. These technologies pertain to air-ground (AG), air-air (AA), and terrestrial communications at aerodromes (airports, airstrips, etc.). One portion of our work addresses more “futuristic” approaches, and this is the subject of this paper. After a brief review of current and currently planned aviation communications technologies, we describe several potential future aviation communication technologies and tools. This includes techniques that are used at present, but largely in non-aviation settings, such as free-space optical communications, troposcatter communications, and near-vertical incidence skywave (NVIS) communications in the HF band. We also discuss some very new techniques still under investigation by the communications research community: orbital angular momentum transmission, orthogonal time-frequency-space (OTFS) modulation, and the application of machine learning to ATM in functions such as dynamic spectrum allocation and spatial trajectory planning. A short review of these techniques is provided, along with an estimate of their potentials and application areas for future air traffic management.