ABSTRACT
We recently concluded a four-year University Leadership Initiative (ULI) project sponsored by NASA, which investigated multiple aviation communications technology areas aimed at enhancing future aviation safety. These areas were dual-band air-ground communications for air traffic management, detection and interdiction of small drones, and high-capacity terrestrial airport communications networking. In this paper we report on flight test results of our dual-band radios. These radios were designed to use a spectrally efficient multi-carrier modulation, filterbank multicarrier (FBMC), which we had previously shown to improve resilience to high-power distance measurement equipment (DME) adjacent-channel interference, in comparison to existing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) schemes. In our NASA project, we designed the FBMC radios to extend performance even further, using the following techniques: (i) simultaneous dual-band transmission and reception;(ii) ground station (GS) spatial diversity;(iii) higher-order modulation for a factor of 5 capacity increase over QPSK;(iv) a Doppler-resilient option using a smaller number of subcarriers;and, (v) 5-MHz bandwidth C-band transmissions for an order of magnitude capacity increase over existing 500-kHz channel schemes. To our knowledge, these are novel achievements for civil aviation, and our flight test results attained a technology readiness level (TRL) of 5. In this paper we briefly describe the project history, in which we spent approximately one year working with Boeing to participate in one of their Eco-Demonstrator flight trials, and obtained special temporary authorizations to transmit in both the L-band and C-band, from the FAA, the FCC, and the DoD. When COVID-19 dispersed worldwide, Boeing was no longer able to support us, so we revised our plans and teamed with the South Carolina Civil Air Patrol (SC CAP) to conduct smaller-scale flight tests. This paper summarizes the radio designs and the novel features we employed, as well as analyses, computer simulations, and laboratory tests prior to terrestrial mobile testing, all of which culminated in our successful flight tests. We show example flight test results that serve as proof of concept for all the five aforementioned radio performance enhancements. Example results include signal-to-noise ratio and bit error ratio, diversity gains, and throughput gains through both higher-order modulation and wider bandwidth channels. We also report on some lessons learned, and some ideas for future advancement of our work. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
COVID-19 might be devastatingly affecting our enterprises, public activities and individual prepping norms and principles but it has also sparked a digital revolution of innovation in different fields. The objective of this paper is to understand the in-depth role of the Internet of Things (IoT) in eHealth to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. This paper covers numerous applications of IoT in healthcare starting from research, telemedicine, teleconsultation via chatbots and virtual assistants providing instantaneous medical help online. Telemedicine and remote patient monitoring is the need of the hour to avoid direct contact with the patients which have been made possible via IoT and its associated tools like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain technology and Cloud Computing. With such high volumes and diversity of data being generated from IoT there is a strong need for connectivity and streaming analytics thus 5G technology and its applications have been discussed like smart 5G connected ambulances and smart 5G based hospitals. Long Range Radio is another promising technology which due to its low power operation and long-distance data transmission at higher speeds is turning out to be the defacto technology for IoT networks across the globe especially in areas with poor network coverage. Seeing the demand for both ventilators and skilled medical professionals due to lack of proper medical infrastructure worldwide, a review of IoT-based smart ventilators has also been carried out. The paper concludes with possible solutions to IoT challenges in healthcare by proposing a smart healthcare model design. Moreover keeping in mind the situation of Covid-19 Pandemic the module also comprises a UVC Disinfection box that would help in eliminating the risk of the virus entering our homes. © 2021 IEEE.