Evaluation of Cellular IoT for Energy-constrained WAIC Applications

Current aircraft sensor networks provide wired connectivity between sensors and avionics systems. This leads to inflexible cabin design, extra weight and high maintenance costs. For these reasons, the Wireless Avionics Intra-Communications (WAIC) standard defines the requirements of future wireless communication systems onboard next-generation aircraft. The majority of WAIC applications involve energy-constrained low data rate devices, which will operate over battery or with the support of energy harvesting techniques in the future. In this work, we investigate the suitability of the novel Long Term Evolution (LTE)/Fifth Generation (5G) wireless technologies for low data rate WAIC applications by means of analytical models and Narrow-Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) hardware experiments. The evaluation is performed in a real airplane and in the presence of external coexisting radio altimeter interference. All the results demonstrate the feasibility and energy efficiency of deploying NB-IoT as well as emerging 5G IoT technologies for future WAIC applications in the absence of interference and motivate the development of robustness techniques to suppress it.

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