FBMC and LDACS Performance for Future Air to Ground Communication Systems

Recently two different L-band digital aeronautical communication systems (LDACS), L-DACS1 and L-DACS2 have been proposed as two Future Communication Infrastructure (FCI) candidates for Air-to-Ground (AG) communication systems, with L-DACS1 selected as the best candidate. In this paper we describe a filter bank multicarrier (FBMC) based communication system, and show its advantages over the LDACS systems. We provide simulation results for all three communication systems to fairly compare their power spectral density (PSD), peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), and BER performance. We show that in a measurement-based AG communication channel model, FBMC has better performance (and spectral containment) than the L-DACS schemes, and this is particularly true in the presence of actual interfering signals from distance measuring equipment (DME). Simulation results show that FBMC can substantially reduce the out-of-band (OOB) power, and can suppress DME interference by at least 19.5 dB, due to its well-localized subcarrier prototype filters. FBMC can also increase throughput and spectral efficiency by reducing the number of guard-band subcarriers and removal of the cyclic prefix, postfix and windowing techniques used in L-DACS1. These results show that an FBMC based communication system can be an appealing candidate for future AG communication systems