FBMC and L-DACS Performance for Future Air-to-Ground Communication Systems

Recently, two different L-band digital aeronautical communication systems (L-DACS), i.e., L-DACS1 and L-DACS2, have been proposed as two future communication infrastructure 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 L-DACS systems. We provide simulation results for all three communication systems to fairly compare their power spectral density, peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), and bit error ratio (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 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, as well as 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.