Wireless communication system design for airport surface management .1. Airport ramp measurements at 5.8 GHz

Airport surface operations (aircraft servicing and maintenance, gate scheduling, and taxi operations) significantly affect the efficiency of airline flight schedules. Therefore, an optimized wireless communication system that supports surface operations can promote airline efficiency. This work presents multipath propagation measurements at airport ramp areas at 5.8 GHz. Statistical characterizations of the wireless channel, from these measurements, indicate large delay spreads (on average 14.78 μs) and small coherence bandwidths (0.5 coherence bandwidth on the order of 12.25 Hz). These findings suggest that the radio environment at an airport offers large diversity gains that can be exploited in future spread-spectrum systems