Efficient Instantaneous Channel Propagation Modeling for Aeronautical Communications Systems with Compressed Sensing

Establishing an instantaneous channel propagation model in aircraft engineering simulators is important for aircraft systems development. This article investigates an instantaneous channel propagation modeling scheme with compressed sensing (CS) recovery and electromagnetic (EM) interpolation for aeronautical communications systems to reduce the cost of flight experiments. Specifically, the system architecture introduces the proposed modeling process of the instantaneous aeronautical channel. The mathematical models are analyzed to show the sparsity of the aeronautical channel with a limited scattering environment. The channel modeling algorithm is detailed by explaining the CS algorithm and the EM interpolation scheme. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method. Most recovery relative errors between the recovering channel model and the real sampled channel responses are lower than 0.1, i.e., −10 dB. More than 75% of the sampling points can be reduced by the proposed method compared with the real flight experiments. Moreover, the proposed single-input-single-output (SISO) approach can also be applied in the potential aeronautical communications systems with multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) transmission.