Development and implementation of an advanced airport data link based on multi-carrier communications

The concept and the demonstrator implementation of an advanced airport data link are described. Its purpose is for data exchange between pilots and controllers in future surface movement guidance and control systems on airports. To fulfil future airport capacity requirements, the proposed data link has to have a high capacity and high data rate. Therefore, the data link design is based on multi-carrier code-division multiple-access (MC-CDMA) which is a flexible and highly efficient multiple-access transmission technique suitable for mobile communications in fading conditions. Both simulation results with typical aeronautical channel scenarios and bit error rate measurements using the demonstrator hardware show the suitability of MC-CDMA for aeronautical communications within an airport and its vicinity. Moreover, implementation effects which degrade the performance are identified and countermeasures are proposed and investigated. The results show that a reduction of the implementation loss of up to 2 dB is achievable by applying appropriate countermeasures.