Adaptive Precoding for Aeronautical Communication Systems in Public Channels

The family of aeronautical communication systems is considered as one of the core technologies for the beyond-the-fifth-generation (B5G) networks, thus attracting rapidly increasing attention from both industry and academia. In this paper, a new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) precoding scheme is proposed for aeronautical communication systems, where the transmit power for the aerial user equipment (UE) approaching the target cell is maximized based on the direction information. Specifically, we first transform the precoding optimization problem into a linear programming problem, and then develop two algorithms to derive the precoders for two transmission modes, namely the multi-stream and single-stream transmissions. For the multi-stream case, an algorithm based on manifold optimization is proposed, which guarantees the equal power allocation for each antenna. For the single-stream case, we derive a precoder by a numerically stable algorithm that extends the Newton-Raphson method. Simulation results show that the proposed precoding schemes can improve the link performance of the UEs with known directions, while ensuring that the performance of the UEs with unknown directions can still be close to that achievable by conventional schemes.