On the practicability of airborne MIMO communication

This paper shows the results of practicability considerations concerning airborne Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna configurations. Desiring channel capacity enhancements and robustness improvements of the data links is the motivation to study MIMO in purely Line of Sight (LoS) and air-to-ground flight scenarios. In the latter case, one ground reflected path is added to the LoS connection for each transmit-receive antenna pair. Figures, how well the capacity can be exploited in realistic systems, are investigated, such as rank and condition number of the channel matrix. They reveal system difficulties, especially for higher numbers of antennas. Also, the dynamic range of the matrix coefficients´ numerical representation for a typical flight scenario is discussed.