Design and implementation of a Wideband Radio using SDR for avionic applications

This paper presents the design and implementation of a Wideband Radio (WBR) in a Software Defined Radio (SDR) multi-system avionic architecture able to send and receive channel data in real time, via Air-to-Ground (A/G) link or satellite link, from/to an Aircraft (A/C) and a Ground Station (GS). The implemented WBR is characterized by sharing resources with other avionic systems, having a single piece of reprogrammable hardware, facilitating In-Flight Connectivity (IFC) services, and drone evolution asking for a rapid transition towards a modernization of the Communications, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) standards in future systems as Next Generation Data Communication of the NextGen program
¹
. The main challenges of this work are: to minimize the size, weight, power and cost (SWap-C) requirements of avionic equipments implementing a flexible solution over SDR; and to establish a suitable robust communication link using Adaptive Coding Modulation (ACM) with bit error rate (BER) better than 10
^-5
. Results in laboratory using a channel simulator to emulate real conditions demonstrate the feasibility of the system as well as provide some performance metrics.