Modeling electromagnetic interference generated by a WLAN system onboard commercial aircraft

The growing demand for the utilization of personal electronic communication devices onboard commercial aircraft necessitates the assurance of safety by airline operators and regulators. This implies that the potential risks posed by the deployment of wireless communication systems on critical aircraft equipment must be carefully assessed and countermeasures taken when required. In this paper, a model based on a ray-tracing algorithm is developed to calculate the electromagnetic interference incident on the fuselage structure of a commercial airline. The source of interference is a 2.4 GHz data communications network. Two scenarios are considered; the first assumes a base station in the centre of the cabin while the second considers four base stations, transmitting at a lower power, distributed along the cabin. The model first determines the propagation map generated by the base stations. These results are used to establish the transmission power required by the personal mobile devices which is then employed to determine the propagation map of each device. The overall electromagnetic interference map incident on the fuselage resulting from the onboard wireless network is generated by vectorially combining the resulting propagation maps. Results for the two scenarios are presented.