Total Cost of Ownership Optimization for Direct Air-to-Ground Communication Networks

Aircraft cabins are one of the last venues without mobile broadband. Considering future 5G applications and connectivity requirements, direct air-to-ground communications (DA2GC) is the only technique which can provide high capacity and low latency backhaul link for aircraft via a direct communication link. To this end, we propose an analytical framework to investigate the ground station deployment problem for DA2GC network employing multi-user beamforming with dual-polarized hybrid DA2GC antenna arrays. In addition, the proposed framework is utilized to analyze and optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the DA2GC network to provide coverage for European airspace. We present the interplay between different network parameters: the number of ground stations, array size, transmit power and bandwidth, and TCO optimizing deployment parameters are calculated in order to satisfy capacity requirements. At the end, we show that, depending on the cost of different network resources, a terrestrial cellular network can be designed to cover the whole European airspace with limited number of ground stations with a certain array size, i.e., 900 and 361 antenna elements for ground station and air station, respectively.