Techniques are provided herein for procedures for establishing an aircraft-to-aircraft mesh network during flight using high-bandwidth directional communication beams. A first aircraft may be able to utilize flight data about a second aircraft to reduce a computational cost of a beam discovery procedure used to establish directional communication beams in the aircraft-to-aircraft mesh network. For example, the first aircraft may receive flight data (e.g., position information, heading, altitude, etc.) using an air traffic control system. The first aircraft may determine one or more predicted locations of the second aircraft based on the flight data. The first aircraft may use the predicted locations to transmit directional discovery beams to only those locations where the second aircraft is likely to be. Upon receiving at least one of the directional discovery beams, the second aircraft and the first aircraft may establish a communication link of the aircraft-to-aircraft mesh network.
DIRECTIONAL BEAM MESH NETWORK FOR AIRCRAFT
2020-11-26
Patent
Electronic Resource
English