Wireless Field Buses for Aerospace Ground and In-Flight Testing: an Experiment

Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radio has been proposed for physical layer standard for high Speed wireless personal area network (WPANs). One proposal is referred to as Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM). This paper proposes to evaluate this powerful modulation scheme in a wireless field bus for aerospace industry hardware system testing. Simulation results show the feasibility and the limits of a software simulation approach. Measurements were done indoor, on Airbus wings and inside à mock-up satellite to determine the real propagation channel, in order to reproduce theses environments in the lab.Frame error rate measurements show a good accuracy of the simulation model for the indoor environment. For the outdoor environment, a lot of measurements were done. Some of these results are presented in this paper. Their strongly varying behavior has to be investigated further.