Analysis of WAIC QoS Guarantees Using Wireless LAN Technology

Wireless avionics intra-communication (WAIC) can increase efficiency and flexibility while reducing cable weight and maintenance costs. Unlike WLAN applications for in-flight entertainment (IFE) systems, WAIC focuses more on quality of service (QoS) requirements, especially low latency. In order to explicitly reflect the data transmission capability of the system, it is considered to use the concept of effective capacity (EC), which is a cross-layer channel model combining physical and data link layers. In this study, we model a kind of avionics compartment channel and fit its channel fading distribution as a Rician distribution. Depending on this distribution, an explicit expression of the EC can be obtained analytically. When the average SNR is set to 15dB and the bandwidth is set to 20MHz, the maximum system arrival rate can be set to 80Mbit/s, where there is a large margin compared to the maximum WAIC communication rate given by ITU-R. Case studies show when the delay-violation probability is set to 10−4, the upper bound of queuing delay can be kept below 10ms with the frame duration set to 2ms, coinciding with analytical results.