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IRIS - Satellite Communication for Air Traffic Management

IRIS

The suitability of different radio access technologies for the provision of aeronautical safety critical communications services over satellite will be investigated.
Pre-selected candidates are taken either from the most promising terrestrial systems for the provision of aeronautical safety critical communications services or from state-of-the-art satellite communications technologies.

The following tasks are foreseen:

• Perform a first assessment if B-AMC is suitable for inclusion into Iris system and identify necessary adjustments, 
• Derive the overall Iris traffic volume generated to serve the entire coverage area, 
• Evaluation of candidate communication protocols defined during the Communication system studies.

Aviation's regulatory bodies place stringent requirements for safety critical communications to/from aircraft in terms of performance and existence of a protected spectrum (due to stringent availability and integrity requirements), which shall be met by any communication system aiming at providing safety critical applications.

Forecasted air traffic growth is being seriously hampered by frequency channel congestion in current communications infrastructure using the VHF frequency bands. This underpins the need to alleviate saturation by additional capacity in congested regions on the one side, and the need for improved operational efficiency in oceanic and remote airspace on the other side. Satellite communications is considered in this context as a potentially valuable resource and shall be hence regarded as an integral part of the foreseen global long term solution.

Simulations to assess the performance of B-AMC waveform over satellite, together with a first attempt to adapt the terrestrial B-AMC design to a satellite scenario have been carried out, showing that the impact of satellite amplifier non-linearities is not that critical. In turn, the impact of the amplifier in the avionic terminal might be critical for the return link and this topic deserves further investigation. Also, the preliminary system adaptation to the satellite scenario should be revised.

Estimation of the overall capacity requirements for the Iris system coverage area for different time horizons has been carried out, the efficiency of different encapsulation schemes and the impact of signalling has been assessed. Further investigation will deal with the detailed analysis of multiple access schemes for the forward link in presence of several ground stations.