Next Generation Wireless Avionics Intra-Communications: Challenges and Research Topics

Traditional intra-aircraft communication systems were designed based mainly on electrical wired links for information exchange, which significantly increases the weight and fuel consumption of aircrafts. It is extremely difficult to examine these systems or replace defective wiring. Wireless avionics intra-communication (WAIC) is an emerging technology to mitigate these problems. This article presents an architecture of a next-generation WAIC network that uses reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and focuses mainly on the wideband (WB) and millimeter wave (mmWave) communications of WAIC systems. We discuss the propagation characteristics of WB mmWave WAIC channel models inside aircrafts. Then, we introduce channel codes for WAIC systems. In particular, we propose novel low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes called collective-encoded LDPC codes (CE-LDPC). In addition, several important physical-layer techniques - for example, transceiver design, multiple-access, beamforming, RIS, and so on - are discussed with their related issues.