A Data-driven Message-based Coverage Estimation Framework for Air to Ground Downlink Communication

It is essential for a flying aircraft to report its position, movement trend and status to the command-and-control station on the ground in real time by means of air-ground communication. However, the coverage quality of air-ground communication is very complex and changeable because it may be affected by many factors. Comprehensive study and accurate estimation of aircraft's coverage performance is helpful to ensure smooth communication, and provide guidelines for the deployment, operation, optimization or even improvement of the air-ground communication system. This work presents a data-driven message-based coverage estimation framework, it utilizes the data records of messages transmission by the aircraft and that of message reception at each receiving node to estimate the communication coverage.