Theory and practice of advanced communication features in aviation

The IEEE 802.16 standard itself consists of a huge set of options and provides only the functionality; therefore, interoperability among different vendor implementations is difficult. The WiMAX Forum has been formed in order to provide certificates about conformity and verification of interoperability. Certificates are given for so called “profiles”, where a profile defines a subset of options from the IEEE 802.16 standard. Not all of these options are mandatory to be implemented. The AeroMACS communication system took the WiMAX Forum Mobile System Profile Specification as a baseline. This paper present a comparison of academic concepts versus implementations in the field based on the future airport communications system AeroMACS. That is, features realized on paper are often implementation intensive and expensive to realize in interoperable products. Therefore, many concepts and corresponding functionalities as described in IEEE 802.16 are not available in products. This paper presents selected features of the data link layer which shall support higher layers services of such as mobility management, quality of service, and multicast.