Dynamic Spectrum Allocation with Carrier Aggregation for Aircraft-to-Ground Communication

Aeronautical communications are expected to increasingly demand spectrum in the next years. Given the endemic scarcity of spectrum, both the opportunistic use of licensed bands and carrier aggregation enable aeronautical systems to accommodate higher data rates and more aircrafts. We study dynamic spectrum allocation for air-to-ground (A2G) transmissions when carriers can be aggregated to form larger channels with complete and incomplete information: the aircrafts might not reveal their available channels for security reasons as it would expose their location. The single and multiple ground station scenarios are analyzed. Semi-distributed algorithms are proposed to deal with the incomplete information case for both scenarios, exhibiting a very good tradeoff between performance and complexity.