Advanced Aeronautical Communication for Air Traffic Management

Abstract

Air to ground communications have been transferred from the congested very high frequency band to occupy the guard bands between adjacent distance measurement equipment (DME) navigation channels within the L-Band. However, the inlayed channels, called L-Band digital aeronautical communications channels (LDACS), experience severe interference with the coexisting DME channels. In this thesis, a DME interference detection and mitigation technique is proposed to improve the performance of the L-Band digital aeronautical communications system in the presence of DME interference. The proposed detection technique is performed by using an adaptive threshold to achieve the best trade-off between the signal detection and false alarm. The proposed interference mitigation technique relies on a code division multiple access. In this thesis, the closed form expression for the probability of detection, false alarm, and the detection error rate are derived. The results show that the proposed technique provides improvement in the probability of detection and the detection error rate compared to the previous work. Moreover, the results shows that the proposed technique provides lower bit error rate and less complexity compared to the previous work.