Optimal Throughput Allocation in Air-to-Ground Networks

While connectivity is available almost anytime and anywhere on ground, aircraft during flight still lack high-throughput communication. We investigate air-to-ground networks consisting of direct air-to-ground, air-to-air and satellite links for providing high throughput to aircraft. We formulate an optimization problem to maximize the minimum throughput of all aircraft. We solve the problem using realistic aircraft and base station positions and also model physical limitations such as maximum number of antennas per aircraft and interference. We investigate different scenarios and parameters and analyze the influence of the parameters on the max-min throughput per aircraft. We show that the satellite and direct air-to-ground links are the bottleneck, as all throughput can be distributed among aircraft. Furthermore we show that air-to-air communication is dispensable for achieving a high throughput when having direct air-to-ground coverage.