Enhanced airport surface multi-carrier communication systems: Filterbank advantages over AeroMACS OFDM

Civil aviation is continuing to grow, and along with growth in numbers of flights and passengers comes growth in communications. In particular airport surface environments are one of the areas in which rapid development of communication systems is taking place. Several years ago the Federal Aviation Administration, EUROCONTROL, and the International Civil Aviation Organization proposed a communication system based on WiMAX technology for airport surface areas: AeroMACS. The AeroMACS communication system is designed for civil aircraft but could also be applied to military airports as well. In this paper we investigate a new communication system for the unique airport surface environment. Our system has physical layer specifications similar to the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) approach used in AeroMACS, but is instead based on the filterbank multicarrier (FBMC) technique. Via computer simulations, using channel models based on measured data collected by NASA Glenn Research Center, we illustrate the FBMC advantages over AeroMACS. Our results show that using zero-forcing or least-square (LS) channel estimation techniques, FBMC and AeroMACS have similar performance, but FBMC affords a significant gain in throughput. Although FBMC has slightly worse bit error ratio (BER) performance than AeroMACS at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) the throughput advantage of the proposed FBMC design is approximately 23 percent.