A Proposal of Wide-Band Air-to-Ground Communication at Airports Employing 5-GHz Band

Recently, the frequency resource for a future wide-band communication system in Air Traffic Control (ATC) at advanced airports has become a vital issue of aeronautical industry, many studies on new frequency bands coupled with high-bit-rate- transmission schemes have been carried out. However, almost all evaluations were done by theoretical analysis and computer simulations. But in this paper, an air-to-ground channel characteristic in a new and wide band, in 5-GHz, is studied for ATC communication in all periods when aircraft was near the airport by practical experiments and measurements. These periods include takeoff/landing, taxi and parking. First, the path-loss and fading-channel models have been studied for each period; then, the performance of MC-CDMA system employing the studied channel characteristics at these periods are evaluated. MC-CDMA has shown its robustness in a high Doppler shift and deep multi-path fading channels during these periods of flight. This paper provides a wide-band communication system in 5-GHz band that is essential for air traffic control communication at any advanced airport.