Interference Mitigation for Future L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System

Abstract

One deployment option for the future broadband L-band Digital Aeronautical Communications System (L-DACS) is operating as an inlay system between two adjacent channels of the Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) system. Investigations for the Broadband Aeronautical Multi-carrier Communications (B-AMC) [1] system, one candidate for the broadband L-DACS, have shown that interference originating from DME systems operating in adjacent channels has a strong impact on the B-AMC system. To enable the utilization of spectral gaps between two adjacent DME channels, two efficient methods for mitigating the impact of interference are proposed and investigated for the B-AMC system, namely pulse blanking and erasure based decoding. Simulations show that the impact of DME interference onto the L-DACS can be reduced considerably by choosing an appropriate coding scheme to make the transmit signal robust against interference. The impact of interference is mitigated by means of the proposed methods, resulting in a performance close to the performance in the interference-free case.