Application of cognitive radio and interference cancellation in the L-Band based on future air-to-ground communication systems

Abstract

The Very High Frequency band (VHF) currently used for aeronautical communications is becoming congested, and future Air-to-Ground (A/G) communication will require much greater use of data communications. For meeting future capacity requirements in aeronautical communications, we propose two new approaches one of which is a cognitive radio based A/G communication network that provides dynamic spectrum access to airplanes to overcome the spectrum scarcity problem in the VHF band. Another approach involves use of a new spectrum in the Ultra-High Frequency band (UHF) to create a new A/G link. In this paper, we propose and investigate the possibilities for developing a spectrum sensing approach to detect idle band in the VHF spectrum and analyze the possible interference between future L-band Digital Aeronautical Communication System (L-DACS) and legacy aeronautical systems. Keywords: LDACS, Cognitive radio, DME