Compression of PIREPs for Throughput-Limited Transmission
Joseph L. Rios, Miguel de la Cruz · 2013 Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations Conference · 2013
Pilot weather reports (commonly referred to as PIREPs) are an essential part of flight planning and situational awareness for pilots. These reports are provided by pilots to flight services stations for dissemination to other pilots. PIREPs are used during pre-flight planning as well as en route by pilots to make more informed decisions about their flight. In some areas, PIREPs are not available (before or after departure) due to lack of traditional aviation communication infrastructure. With the concept of PIREP compression presented here, multiple PIREPs can be bundled together for a single transmission over throughput-limited channels not typically used for aviation. For example, 10 to 20 compressed PIREPs might be transmitted via a cellular text message and even more might be sent via satellite using this concept, which is an increase of up to 10 times the amount of data. In this paper, the compression algorithm is presented along with some analysis of the loss of information incurred through the compression-decompression cycle. I.