Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports (2023) / Chapter Skim
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7 C H A P T E R 1 1.1 Airport Uses of Wireless Technologies Understanding the applications that wireless technologies can unlock is part of the decisionmaking process for investments in wireless infrastructure. This chapter provides an overview of the current and potential uses of wireless technologies in an airport environment with respect to passenger experience, airport/airline operation, commercial services, safety and security, and travel health.
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8 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Autonomous vehicles and robotics Autonomous surface vehicles ● ● ○ ○ ○ Mobile robots ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) ○ ○ ○ ● ● Incident response and recovery Radio communications for first response teams ● ● ● ○ ○ First responder personal protection ● ● ● ○ ○ Wireless real-time surveillance for incident investigation ● ● ● ○ ○ Wireless use case Airport type Primary Non-primary Other Large hub/ medium hub Small hub/ non-hub General aviation/ reliever Cargo MRO Passenger experience and commercial service Wireless parking and electric vehicle charging ● ● ● Wireless HD screens and information kiosks ○ ○ Wireless self-service check-in kiosks ● ● Mobile passenger checkpoint ● ● ○ Contactless purchasing ● ○ ○ Mobile communications for visitors ● ● ● Enhanced in-building mobile carrier coverage ● ○ Location-based visitor information ● ● Mobile AR wayfinding ● ○ Airport/airline operations Wireless enterprise communications ● ● ● ○ ○ Wireless-based passenger flow monitoring ● ○ Wireless asset tracking, monitoring, and control ● ○ ○ ● ● Wireless advanced visual docking guidance system (AVDGS)
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 9 Travel health Wireless-based social distancing monitoring ● ○ ○ Wireless-based automatic passenger temperature screening ○ ○ ○ Touchless travel ● ● ○ Wireless-based staff contact tracing ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ Note: ● Applicable ○ Potentially applicable Abbreviations: AR = augmented reality; HD = high definition; MRO = maintenance, repair, and overhaul. Wireless use case Airport type Primary Non-primary Other Large hub/ medium hub Small hub/ non-hub General aviation/ reliever Cargo MRO Table 2.
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10 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports With the number of electric vehicles (EVs) continuing to grow, more airports are installing EV chargers.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 11 or other businesses placing advertisements on HD screens. Such advertising would likely stimulate additional sales for in-terminal tenants (e.g., retailers, food and beverages)
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12 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports • Aeronautical revenue. Wireless self-service kiosks can be an airport-owned asset for common airline use.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 13 process everywhere across the stage in travelers' movement through an airport. This, in turn, reduces the number of required airport personnel to assist travelers and increases labor operational efficiency.
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14 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Mobile Communications for Visitors Mobile devices have become an essential part of people's lives, making the devices used by passengers and visitors a major consumer of wireless connectivity. These include cellular/Wi-Fi/ Bluetooth-enabled phones, tablets, computers, smart watches, smart glasses, and any other electronic device that visitors and passengers carry with them and use to stay connected for entertainment and business tasks.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 15 Value Proposition: • Customer satisfaction. In-terminal mobile carrier coverage enables transparent, automatic selection of the network provider that best covers the user.
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16 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports services, can improve the tracking of social media postings and correlate them to emergency events. Mobile Augmented Reality Wayfinding Augmented reality (AR)
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 17 Examples of enterprise applications at the airport include communications for administrative tasks such as intranet and file sharing, human resource management, conferencing, or email. Applications for airport operation tasks include passenger-processing systems, departure control systems, and GIS map sharing, in addition to applications for staff communication in the field.
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18 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Value Proposition: • Customer satisfaction. Wireless enterprise communications address the network needs of airport tenants.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 19 • Efficiency and sustainability. Understanding the way passengers use the terminals can help managers locate concession stores more effectively, identify operational inefficiencies through bottlenecks, reassign gates to better distribute passengers within the terminal, or redesign the building to improve the overall passenger experience.
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20 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Wireless Advanced Visual Docking Guidance System (A-VDGS) When an aircraft proceeds into its parking position, A-VDGS allows aircraft to dock and park within the apron using enhanced visual guides and alerts for pilots, which improves safety as well as accuracy.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 21 wireless sensor networks, which ensures accountability and quality of the cargo involved. The advantages of operating a modern cargo monitoring network in large cargo hubs are evident because information can be more easily captured and shared for items that require the participation of multiple stakeholders in their storage, processing, and shipping.
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22 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports technologies could support this application, IATA recommends the use of RFID technology at airports due to its accuracy, simplicity, and low cost. RFID has a major advantage over barcode scanning: It can track tagged items with more accuracy and from a longer distance.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 23 Energy (BLE) can establish self-configurable networks to propagate action commands from a reference location throughout the entire lighting stream without the need for any communication infrastructure.
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24 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports EFBs and having onboard aircraft devices at the apron is a high-value service that can be offered for a fee to customer airlines. This would generate a new stream of aeronautical revenue.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 25 Wireless Airfield Sensors Safe and secure airfield operations are supported by an airport's ability to monitor the environment of its airfield, including air traffic (Automatic Terminal Information Service) ; wildlife; weather, including automated weather observing system (AWOS)
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26 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports are an adequate alternative to wireline infrastructure to reduce costs of construction and maintenance for connectivity with equipment in remote areas, or as a backup communications link to improve reliability. In addition, deploying wireless, battery-powered sensors directly for simple monitoring tasks is a cost-efficient way to expand coverage of sensing sites in remote locations without direct access to power sources.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 27 and facilities also are concerned about the limitations of the existing wireless systems. In general, wireless communications are not considered the primary means to provide network coverage for cameras.
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28 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports • Efficiency and sustainability. The added feature of a visual aid guidance system reduces the workload for controllers keeping track of all vehicles and their relation to each other.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 29 • Efficiency and sustainability. Using wireless connectivity for these sensors allows for a more flexible placement among the terminal building and reduces installation costs by eliminating the need for additional cabling.
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30 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Autonomous Surface Vehicles Autonomous transportation can be performed by different types of vehicles, including trains, buses, and trolleys. These vehicles move along predetermined paths and use a range of sensors including lidar, stereo cameras, inertial measurement units, radars, and GPS to navigate and detect and avert any obstacles in their path.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 31 • Reliability of operations. Autonomous vehicles eliminate the need for personnel to be actively involved in the manual operational activities of the airport and instead allows personnel to monitor and control its activities, often from a remote post.
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32 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) The use of UAVs in both the commercial and defense sectors has been growing steadily.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 33 by surveillance applications, this section consolidates different wireless applications that allow the competent authorities in the airport to react effectively when an incident occurs. Quick, dynamic, and effective incident response requires the presence of personnel in or near the area of the incident.
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34 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Value Proposition: • Reliability of operations. An enhanced means of communication allows for better coordination of tasks in time-critical responses to incidents.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 35 Value Proposition: • Reliability of operations. This use case provides enhanced awareness of the sequence of events during an incident or accident.
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36 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Airport is one of the airports using motion analytics technology called "safe distance" to monitor social distancing via the tracking of smartphone locations. Lidar and passenger flow analytics are also positioned as technologies that monitor crowds gathering in a particular area and compliance with social distancing requirements.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 37 • Efficiency and sustainability. This use case can help to reduce the number of airport staff required to interact with and assist travelers during their travel experience at the airport.
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38 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports 1.2.1.1 Cellular Technologies Cellular communications are designed for wide-area networks (WANs) whose access communication link is wireless and supports device mobility (Figure 8)
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 39 completed at the end of 2022. As a result of the phase-out schedule, there will be less implementation of 2G or 3G at this time.
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40 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports • Ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC)
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 41 mission-critical push-to-talk communications, mission-critical video, and mission-critical data with built-in prioritization over consumer applications. Isolated operations allow cell sites to continue o ering services even with the loss of backhaul connectivity.
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42 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports As a limitation, virtually all cellular communications are provided by mobile carriers with exclusive licenses to frequency bands; thus, using this technology creates a dependence on these carriers and their respective decisions on how to use this spectrum (e.g., see the discussion of 5G near airports in Section 1.2.3)
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 43 by mid-2024, and certified products and commercial equipment should be available soon afterward. In addition, two other technologies maintained by the Wi-Fi Alliance are emerging: • HaLow, based on IEEE 802.11ah, has recently been launched to use Wi-Fi technology to support long-range, low-power, low-bandwidth IoT services.
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44 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports necessary to ensure acceptable coverage and capacity for all users, configure appropriate traffic management policies, and mitigate interference among APs or with neighboring networks operating at the same frequency. This specific topic is addressed in ACRP Report 127: A Guidebook for Mitigating Disruptive WiFi Interference at Airports (Carroll et al.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 45 energy. Thus, Wi-Fi devices require continuous battery charging or power input.
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46 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports safety use, using a dedicated spectrum not shared with consumer applications. The long coverage range and high bandwidth with QoS make it suitable for a range of applications over long distances.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 47 Push-To-Talk (PTT)
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48 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports designed to provide quick and secure transmission in a robust spectrum of environments. They have an outstanding reputation for reliability based on the ruggedness of equipment, militarygrade encryption of voice and data transmissions, and the numerous failsafe options built into LMR radios and networks.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 49 40 km/h. LoRa uses Spread Spectrum, which results in high bandwidth, thus potentially increasing collision probability in larger networks and a ecting scalability.
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50 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports which makes the technology unusable if the service area is not covered. HaLow overcomes these issues because it is designed as a fully open standard; however, a commercial ecosystem has not developed yet.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 51 • Low energy coded. Lower throughputs (125 or 500 kbps)
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52 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports NFC protocols and data exchange formats are based on existing RFID standards as outlined in ISO/IEC 18092, and speci c for 13.56 MHz RFID tags and contactless smart cards. NFC allow the same RFID device to act both as a reader and as a tag and is usually integrated within electronic devices such as smartphones.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 53 For instance, reading accuracy decreases when working near metal objects due to RF signal re ections. In general, the requirement of having tags attached to the object being tracked could, soon, make RFID less convenient and more expensive than emerging solutions based on computer vision for LOS environments (e.g., baggage tracking)
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54 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports In addition to throughput and range, key metrics such as security, reliability, mobility, and device density determine the suitability of access technology to support specific applications or services. This section examines this aspect.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 55 • Subscriber management. Automatic, seamless Wi-Fi network discovery and signup for cellular users via roaming agreements greatly improve the customer experience for venue visitors and allows for better management of the subscriber.
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56 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Security and reliability are key requirements for enterprise networks and mission-critical communications. Enterprise communications give secure access to staff for applications including intranet, resource sharing, teleconference, and collaborative decision-making, and require high capacity only achievable by cellular, Wi-Fi, or AeroMACS technologies.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 57 Because AeroMACS is the only wireless technology standard certified for aviation safety on the airport surface, including flight deck communications, FAA supports it. FAA uses AeroMACS in eight U.S.
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58 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Throughput Coverage Low latency Mobility Reliability and… Location accuracy Battery life Scalability PAN U-LPWAN RFID Figure 19. Comparison of technologies specific to automation and IoT reliability and security.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 59 flexibility of design, and they can work together to allow for a range of data transmission mobility and battery life requirements. They can both operate in private enterprise environments, or leverage carrier cellular infrastructure.
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60 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Zigbee use cases are focused on home automation, medical device data collection, and other low-power, low-bandwidth needs to be designed for small-scale projects using low-cost digital radios with low mobility. Some examples include smart city lighting, specialized utility solutions, embedded sensing, smoke and intruder warning, and smart building (connected lighting, building automation, remote configuration, efficient energy control, climate and HVAC control, daylight and window blind systems, room assignment and access control, and safety)
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 61 Table 7 shows the spectrum bands usable by the analyzed wireless technologies in the United States. According to utilization rules and license requirements, there are three major types of spectra: • Licensed.
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62 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports This type is being applied to frequency bands recently opened to a wider range of users: 3.5 GHz (CBRS)
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 63 Unlicensed spectrum is open for use to any user if they comply with FCC power limitations for the specific band. Networks in unlicensed frequencies use a Listen-Before-Talk mechanism to select channels previously measured to ensure no interference with other networks.
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64 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports framework implies additional complexity, CBRS offers an alternative to footprint-wide macro-cell networks and supports sustainable, scalable business models for indoor small-cell deployments funded and owned by enterprises and venue owners, which have so far eluded the U.S. market.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 65 CNS system Description Spectrum Potentially affected technology Narrowband FM Analog radio systems before LMR but still in operation in some environments for local police, fire, and emergency medical services. 0.3–3.4 kHz Non-directional beacon (NDB)
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66 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports 1.2.4 Deployment Models Enterprises and venue managers such as airports, which have control over the real estate where they operate, have different options for deploying and managing wireless technology on the premises. This section discusses three models for the deployment and operation of wireless technologies (Figure 20)
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 67 In addition to consumer applications, public networks can support public-safety services. Operator entities, being mobile carriers or public-safety organizations, distribute channel assignments among agencies in the coverage area and include some shared channels for mutual aid.
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68 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports to reduce the costs of deployment and operation. A main limitation of the model is the complexity of agreements required for the customer to ensure the performance of the system, upgrades, and enhancements.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 69 1.3.1 Actors Involved in the Provision and Consumption of Wireless Services in the Airport As with any other service, wireless connectivity is defined by the relationship between the provider (supplier) and the consumer (customer)
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70 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports 1.3.1.2 Service Providers Wireless service providers are entities responsible for wireless connectivity. The service provider can engage in the provision of wireless connectivity services at three different levels: • Own.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 71 is outsourced to a delegated entity, if the ownership and liability of the network infrastructure fall within the purview of the airport operator. The connectivity and quality of service required by tenants also fall under the contractual responsibility of the airport operator as included in terms of lease or tenant service agreements.
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72 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports 1.3.2 Wireless Deployment Architectures in Airports This section describes the implementation models for the wireless network connectivity services which provide value from suppliers to consumers within an application environment. A deployment architecture is a logical definition of a network topology in terms of which users are connected and how.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 73 Figure 23. Deployment architectures for wireless services at the airport.
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74 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports providing customer experience through ubiquitous connectivity on the premises. However, the service and subscriber are controlled by the mobile carrier without any involvement of the airport operator.
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 75 by network planning and spectrum governance, or by enforcing broadcasting rights to control emissions in unlicensed bands within the airport spaces. Private networks in unlicensed spectrum are prevalent at airports today as demonstrated by Wi-Fi networks o ered for guest internet access and airport/tenant enterprise applications.
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76 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports 1.3.2.3 Private Critical Network Infrastructure is architecture is like that of the private enterprise/consumer network in that the airport operator or delegated entity is responsible for connectivity. However, this is a speci c network created for highly secure, critical services speci c to airport personnel ensuring reliable operations, such as tactical communications, perimeter surveillance, UAV command and control, and ight deck communications (Figure 26)
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 77 or ad hoc need for communications (e.g., in an incident area)
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78 Transformation in Wireless Connectivity: Guide to Prepare Airports Business model Airport wireless service offering Real-estate rental Minimizes network operation costs and targets nonaeronautical revenue from service providers and tenants via cell tower space rental, integrated cabling and utilities, and easement agreements. Managed services Targets control of generation of the value proposition from wireless networks (customer satisfaction, revenue and cost savings, and reliability)
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Taxonomy of Wireless Technologies and Their Uses in Airports 79 Wireless maturity level Main capabilities Corresponds to airport digital maturity level 0.0 Initial Still improving wideband internet access at the facility. Airport limited to managing operations and real estate, not concerned with connectivity.
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