C-band digital aeronautical communication for unmanned aircraft systems

The drone market is anticipated to make up of 10% of the European Union aviation market in the next ten years. Typical fields of operation are logistics/transportation, agriculture or surveillance tasks. Both Unmanned Aircraft (UAs) and traditional manned aircraft are sharing the same airspace. Therefore concepts for the integration of UAs into the controlled and uncontrolled airspace are mandatory. An essential part of this integration is the communication between all participants. Hence the development of reliable data links as well as channel models for different flight scenarios to validate the link concepts is required. In this paper we discuss the application of OFDM- and SC-FDMA-based communication links and test them against three flight scenarios: en-route, take-off and landing, and airport using Monte-Carlo simulations. We suggest different coding schemes and show that iterative decoding processes have disadvantages in case of insufficient channel estimation.