Wideband Channel Modeling for Wireless Avionics Intra-Communications

Wireless Avionics Intra-Communications (WAIC) has been proposed to partially replace costly wiring in future generations of aircraft. Besides the allocation of a frequency range and several performance figures, there is no standardized transmission scheme so far. For the design of suitable physical layer techniques, comprehensive models are required to perform realistic link-level simulations for the aircraft environment. This paper presents a wideband channel model for in-cabin WAIC systems, derived from channel measurements performed in an Airbus A321 cabin. The model is validated by comparing experimentally measured and simulated frame error rates using the proposed model in an IEEE 802.11a-based OFDM transmission.