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

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 assist with the standardization process, a flight demonstration was conducted to demonstrate the protocol’s ability to operate successfully in a real-world setting. 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 data link protocol implementations which makes them comparable based on the same metrics. The results obtained from the comparison of different LDACS implementations can be utilized in the standardization process, as they demonstrate that LDACS can meet the requirements of a modern digital data link for aviation.