Spectral Coexistence of LDACS and DME: Analysis via Hardware Software Co-Design in Presence of Real Channels and RF Impairments

Abstract

To meet the exponentially increasing air traffic, L-band (960-1164 MHz) digital aeronautical communication system (LDACS) has been introduced. The LDACS aims to exploit the vacant spectrum between incumbent Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) signals and envisioned to follow an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) approach to support high-speed delay-sensitive multimedia services. This paper deals with the design and implementation of end-to-end LDACS the transceiver on the Zynq System on Chip platform, consisting of FPGA as programmable logic (PL) and ARM as processing system (PS). We consider OFDM based LDACS and improve it further using windowing and/or filtering. We propose a hardware-software co-design approach and analyze various transceiver configurations by dividing it into PL and PS. We demonstrate the flexibility offered by such a co-design approach to choose the configuration as well as word-length for a given area, delay and power constraints. The transceiver is also integrated with the programmable analog front-end to validate its functionality in the presence of various RF impairments and wireless channels and interference specific to the LDACS environment. Via in-depth performance analysis concerning parameters such as out-of-band attenuation, DME interference, bit-error-rate, word-length, and complexity, we demonstrate wide bandwidth filtered OFDM as an attractive solution for the next generation LDACS.