Geostationary satellite link availability of airborne communication nodes

Satellite links are essential for an airborne communication node to maintain connectivity to the global information grid (GIG) infrastructure. Satellite links may not always be available due to the limited antenna scanning capability and the aircraft´s maneuvering. Link outage can be alleviated by increasing the scanning capability, which may be realized by placing more antennas on the aircraft. This leads to several important questions in the system design: in order to keep the links highly available, how many antennas are needed? How much scanning capability of each antenna is required? And where should these antennas be installed on the aircraft? In this paper, we propose a novel analysis approach to address these issues. The analysis is based on the aircraft-centric geometric framework. The link availability is computed and averaged over all the aircraft locations, which are assumed uniformly distributed in the earth coverage footprint of a geostationary satellite. The analysis also provides guidelines to configure the antennas for the desired link availability