Antenna configuration mitigating ground reflection fading on airport surface for AeroMACS

AeroMACS (Aeronautical Mobile Airport Communications System) is an aeronautical wireless communication standard which provides high-speed cellular networks on airport surfaces. For successful deployment, unique propagation characteristic on the airport surface should be taken into account. In particular, a major part of the airports is potentially an open line-of-sight environment with a flat surface. Consequently, deep nulls created by the ground reflection fading significantly degrade the throughput. Therefore, this paper proposes using a vertical array configuration at the base station for mitigating the ground reflection fading. The vertical array configuration is advantageous in comparison with a horizontal array configuration on the airport surfaces because the fading nulls appear at different distances. Measurement using a prototype system demonstrated improvements of 5 dB in the received signal strength indicator and 2.4 Mbps in the throughput. Agreement between the measurement and simulation was also observed.