Reliable Communications for Future Aviation

Aviation growth will require advances in air-ground and air-air communications, navigation, and surveillance (CNS). Projects such as NASA’s Advanced Air Mobility (AAM), which is aimed at the transportation of both cargo and people in low-altitude flights in and around urban areas, require extremely high-reliability links, sometimes with low latencies. In this presentation, we provide background on aviation trends and estimated aviation link quality requirements, briefly discuss draft AAM system requirements, then address reliable air-ground (AG) communications. For this we review both intrinsic challenges such as wireless channel impairments and spectrum constraints, as well as extrinsic challenges such as interference, both unintentional and intentional (i.e., jamming). We summarize reliability techniques at the network and data link layers, then focus on the physical layer, and discuss in some detail AG channel effects, transmission security (transec), and anti-jam (AJ) techniques. We illustrate that by taking an adversary’s perspective we can improve link design and operation. The talk will conclude with comments on the future potential of machine learning and artificial intelligence, along with other areas for future work.

David Matolak

Professor, Electrical Engineering, University of South Carolina on October 17, 2025 at 10:15 AM in EB2 1231
Join Zoom Webinar

David W. Matolak received the B.S. degree from The Pennsylvania State University, M.S. degree from The University of Massachusetts, and Ph.D. degree from The University of Virginia, all in electrical engineering. He has over 25 years’ experience in communication system research, development, and deployment, with industry, government institutions, and academia, including AT&T Bell Labs, L3 Communication Systems, MITRE, and Lockheed Martin. He has over 250 refereed publications and ten patents. He was a professor at Ohio University (1999-2012), and since 2012 has been a professor at the University of South Carolina. He has been Associate Editor for several IEEE journals, is currently the chair of the IEEE VTS Propagation Committee, and has delivered several dozen invited presentations at a variety of international venues. His research interests are radio channel modeling, communication techniques for non-stationary fading channels, and secure and covert communications. Prof. Matolak is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of standards groups in RTCA and ITU, and a member of Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, URSI, ASEE, AAAS, and AIAA.

This lecture series features exciting and dynamic visiting and virtual speakers from across the range of ECE disciplines. Take some time every Friday morning to be inspired by these great scientists and engineers before heading into the weekend!