On the Characterization of Cochannel Interference in an Aeronautical Mobile Environment

In this paper, complex cochannel interference of an aeronautical communication system operating in a heavy-traffic environment of 3000 aircraft is modeled and analyzed using a visualization method. This method transforms the cochannel interference, which is specified in terms of message overlaps, from a visual representation to a matrix representation of message overlaps for further statistical analysis. We show that the statistical Poisson distribution provides the best estimates for the message-overlap statistics results. In addition, its cumulative distribution is found to provide useful information regarding the multimessage-decoding capability of a special type of receiver. The results demonstrate that message-overlap statistics could aid in determining the best approach for mitigating cochannel interference.