DVB-S2/DVB-RCS satellite system performance assessment for IFE and ATN aeronautical communications

This paper presents the PhD work conducted by Na TAO. The director of this thesis is Professor Michel BOUSQUET. The study is supervised by Alain PIROVANO and Jose RADZIK. This PhD work has started January 2006 and will end in December 2008. Two concurrent satellite systems are presently proposed for in-flight entertainment (IFE) communications, thus demonstrating the capability of satellites to provide multimedia access to users on board airplanes. At the same time, an increasing interest for the use of satellite communications for air traffic control has been motivated by the increasing load of traditional radio links, mainly in the VHF band. However, the development of a dedicated satellite system for ATC (Air Traffic Control) and ATN (Aeronautical Telecommunication Network) seems to be a long-term perspective. The objective of the presented system design is to provide both passenger application traffic (Internet, GSM) access and a high-reliability channel for aeronautical applications using the same satellite links. Due to the constraints in capacity and radio bandwidth allocation, very high frequencies (above 20 GHz) are considered here. The corresponding design implications for the air interface are taken into account and access performances are derived using a dedicated simulation model. Some preliminary results are shown in this paper to demonstrate the technical feasibility of such system design with increased capacity, more details and the open issues will be studied in the future of the thesis research