Fiber-Wireless cabin mobile communications on civil Aircraft

Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) benefits the wireless communications system with high capacity and lower transmission power. In this paper, FiWi is deployed in the Cabin for Mobile Communications on Aircraft (MCA). Due to the tunnel-shape of the cabin, the traditional scheme with multiple Access Points (AP) connected on data-bus suffers from the transmission power restriction and multipath fading. However, with FiWi, the analog signals received by different APs can be transmitted by the fiber optical signal and directly combined together before the final demodulation. Additionally, the diversity gain is obtained because APs of FiWi network can directly modulate the received wireless signal on the passive optical fiber to extend the service area of the onboard base-station or hub. Moreover, compared with the traditional multiple APs on data-bus, the interference is mitigated and the capacity is increased in the proposed system. Especially, when Multiple Input and Multiple Output (MIMO) transmission is utilized, i.e. IEEE802.11n, the correlation of the antennas is decreased and the capacity of the communication system is maintained. In this paper, the FiWi cabin network architecture is proposed and analyzed. The channel and network models are established and optimized. The resources allocation scheme is also highlighted. The simulation confirms the validity and efficiency of the proposed fiber wireless cabin mobile communications on civil aircraft.