Empowering Heterogeneous Communication Data Links in General Aviation through mmWave Signals

We study data transfer links that would enable development of low-cost technologies for increasing safety of general aviation (GA). The solution proposed here is to supplement the existing cmWave solutions with mmWave cellular signals in order to better handle interferences and to reach lower outage probabilities and higher throughputs. Moreover, cellular solutions have the advantage of re-using existing or planned infrastructure, and thus they are expected to require minor additional investments. Our article aims both at shedding some light on the terminology in the GA field and at proposing future viable data-link solutions in GA. We also survey the existing solutions, challenges, and opportunities related to the wireless communication links in GA, and we present several case studies related to the achievable outage probabilities and throughputs under rural and urban scenarios of low-altitude GA vehicles. We conclude that supplementing the existing cmWave wireless links with mmWave wireless connections is a workable solution for affordable communication links for low-altitude GA aircraft.