A Software Framework for Synthetic Aeronautical Data Traffic Generation in Support of LDACS Evaluation Activities

Abstract

To accommodate the increasing number of aircraft and the growing demand for a secure data connection in the air, the LDACS A/G has been developed and is on the verge of being standardized. To support the standardization process, a flight campaign was held to show the feasibility of the protocol operating in a real-world environment. For this, radio prototypes that implement the LDACS A/G protocol were installed on the ground and aboard an aircraft. To thoroughly test these prototypes, tailored realistic flight data had to be sent, received, and analyzed. In this paper, we present the Finfrastructure software framework, that we use to assess the performance of different radio prototypes. We discuss our considerations for measuring the performance of different radio prototypes. By using a simple IPv6-based interface for each prototype, the framework supports various environments, such as lab tests, simulations, and flight campaigns. We measure, among others, latency, throughput, and link stability. Our results show the different performances of the prototypes which makes them comparable based on the same metrics. These results can then be used in the standardization of LDACS. They show that it is feasible to implement prototypes that fulfill the requirements of a modern digital data link for aviation. By measuring the performance of different prototypes that implement the same protocol, we can estimate the expected performance of the final products when the protocol has been standardized and it can help the standardization itself by showing that the new protocol holds up to modern requirements.