Spectrum demand for air/ground air traffic management communications

The Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) of the MITRE Corporation, in conjunction with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), has been studying the future capacity and spectrum requirements for air/ground aeronautical mobile communications. A VDL Mode 2 protocol model has been developed to estimate the number of aircraft a ground station can support with varying traffic loads. This capacity, in conjunction with the expected aircraft density, determines the number of frequency channels and ground radio sites that will be needed to support various levels of future data communications services. From this analysis, the timeliness of the need for 8.33 kHz channelization for voice services, particularly with respect to the impacts of creation of a data communications subband within the VHF frequency band, is inferrred. This paper contains the details of the study and describes the ability of the FAA's current and planned communications infrastructure to meet the requirements of performance-based air traffic management and NextGen communications using the aeronautical VHF spectrum.