Aeronautical virtual MIMO communications with terrestrial linear array antenna

With the increasing traffic of civil aircraft, the Air-to-Ground (A/G) communications come into being the broadband datalink to provide the services for Air-Traffic Control (ATC), Airline Operation Communications (AOC) and Air Passenger Communications (APC). The requirement for data rate exceeds Mbps. Due to the limited spectrum assigned for aeronautical communications, the traditional Single Input and Single Output (SISO) datalink is confronted with the bottleneck to provide broadband services. In this paper, virtual Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) scheme is proposed to handle this issue. Meanwhile, a group of aircrafts are synchronized to transmit data to Ground Station (GS) deployed with terrestrial array antenna. The proposed virtual MIMO scheme not only increases the transmission rate, but also improves the system capacity. Moreover, the aircraft can be assigned multiple frequency points and achieves the diversity gain in the transmission with multiple virtual MIMO links.