LTE-BASED AERONAUTICAL MOBILE TELEMETRY - LAB AND FIELD TEST EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

Aeronautical mobile telemetry (AMT) based on 3GPP’s LTE standard is implemented in a proof-of-concept system. The solution tackles the very high Doppler shifts expected in flight tests using an appliqué that can be inserted between the transmit/receive ports of the Test Article (TA) and the antennas. This appliqué estimates the Doppler shift and proactively compensates for it on the uplink signal being transmitted by the TA. The overall system has been tested under different operational conditions in a laboratory setup as well as in the field. In the laboratory setup, the desired operating conditions are created with a set of Software-Defined-Radio-based channel emulators coupled with a computer to control their behavior. In order to carry out field tests, an operational LTE network has been created at Edwards Air Force Base (EAFB) with two base stations, backhaul links, and a core network. In this paper, we provide descriptions of both laboratory and field test setups as well as the results of several tests that have been carried out to date. The results of lab and field tests lend strong support to the viability of this AMT solution.