Method to emulate the L-band digital aeronautical communication system for SESAR evaluation and verification

The VHF voice communication system currently used for air traffic control is experiencing increasing capacity problems. The “L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System” is an upcoming technology providing an aeronautical datalink outside of the VHF band. The objective of this paper is to develop a method to emulate its communication performance. We developed a formal model of the system and implemented it on the basis of the dummynet network emulation tools. This implementation was deployed in a networking appliance and measured in a test-bed network. The results indicate that the emulator provides the performance predicted by simulations and is suitable to evaluate and verify protocols and applications envisioned to utilize this datalink.