Blümm C, Heller C (2012)
Publication Type: Conference contribution
Publication year: 2012
Conference Proceedings Title: Convention for Telemetry, Test Instrumentation and Telecontrol
Event location: Munich, DE
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as well as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), are increasingly used in military operations to avoid endangerment of pilots and soldiers. Also civil use cases for such kind of platforms are emerging, for instance for surveillance or search and rescue missions. The operation of unmanned vehicles in most cases requires two different types of data connections: A command and control (C2) link to pilot the unmanned vehicle in its mission environment as well as a payload link to transfer sensor or video data to the ground control station. While the C2 link has to be optimized with respect to maximum robustness, the sensor data link has to provide data rates in the range of several Mbit/s for reasonable operation. The conventional solution is to use two independent data links, each with a modulation that is optimized for its transmission requirements. The usage of Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) allows the realization of multiple logical links with different transmission characteristics in a single waveform and in a single modem. The set of orthogonal carrier functions provided by an OFDM modulation for this purpose is partitioned into multiple sets of carriers that are assigned to the individual logical links. The different carrier sets are used with specific subcarrier modulation schemes and code rates, depending on the robustness required by the logical link. These parameters, together with the number of subcarriers per carrier set, determine the usable data rate of each logical link. In this paper, we present the design of an OFDM waveform for the simultaneous transmission of control and payload data in a UAV/UGV scenario for security services video surveillance, originating from the German funded project “Sichere Navigation für autonome Robotik-Plattformen” (SiNafaR). We point out specific design considerations as well as benefits and drawbacks of this integrated data link solution, and we give performance figures of the final link implementation to validate the concep
APA:
Blümm, C., & Heller, C. (2012). C2 and Payload in one Link – Chances and Challenges of OFDM. In Convention for Telemetry, Test Instrumentation and Telecontrol. Munich, DE.
MLA:
Blümm, Christian, and Christoph Heller. "C2 and Payload in one Link – Chances and Challenges of OFDM." Proceedings of the Convention for Telemetry, Test Instrumentation and Telecontrol, Munich, DE 2012.
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