Performance Analysis of Reconfigurable Filtered OFDM for LDACS

In order to sustain the rapid growth in air traffic, the L -band Digital Aeronautical Communication System (LDACS) is proposed for air-to-ground communications. We recently proposed reconfigurable filtered OFDM (Ref-OFDM) based LDACS which offers better out-of-band (OOB) emission and hence, higher spectrum utilization than existing LDACS without compromising on the bit-error-rate (BER) and complexity. In this paper, we analyze the performance of Ref-OFDM based LDACS in terms of throughput and OOB emission for various resolution of Digital to Analog Converters (DAC). We also analyze the effects of pulse blanking technique on the BER for the transmission of bandwidth of 498 KHz and 732 KHz. The simulation results and analysis highlights the efficacy of the Ref-OFDM as an attractive alternative to existing LDACS.