Analysis of satellite-to-aircraft communications using ray tracing model.

Abstract:While the aircraft flying above the earth surface, the signal transmitted
from the satellite to the aircraft suffered from changes in it's characteristics at the aircraft receiver's antenna according to many factors affecting the direct and reflected power from the earth surface such as the distance difference, the nature of the earth surface, elevation angle, Doppler shift, etc… This Thesis introduces a proposed algorithm to analyze and simulate the communication link between the Satellite and the aircraft taking into account all the parameters that affect the magnitude of the power and signal characteristics received at the aircraft antenna. The proposed method uses the ray-tracing technique in this simulation to analyze the communication link between the Satellite and aircraft. The simulation developed in this thesis has minimized the error percentage as much as possible taking into account most of the factors that might affect the characteristics of the signal received by the aircraft from the satellite. This simulation considers the free space loss, specular reflection losses, scattering factor, earth curvature effect, etc…,also the simulation takes into account the Doppler effect that caused by the aircraft movements. The simulation measures the received signal strength and fading characteristics of satellite to aircraft communication to determine the effectiveness of communication and to establish parameters which can be useful to the communication system designer in Iraq and the rest of the world. MATLAB® v6.5 used in the simulation as application software, the simulation also applied to MATLAB® v7.0.