Capacities of mobile air/ground radio communication systems employing cylindrical cells

Cylindrical cells represent actual service volumes used in terminal areas (airports) for air traffic control (ATC) communications between pilots and ground controllers. The channel capacities of simplex and duplex frequency division multiplexing (FDM) mobile air/ground (A/G) radio communication systems employing cylindrical cells are compared assuming a network of identical cylindrical cells and a dedicated radio channel per group of aircraft and its ground controller. The two systems are compared considering both cochannel and adjacent channel interferences for analog and digital modulation. Then, capacities of duplex FDM and code division multiplexing (CDM) are compared under the same assumptions for digital modulation. The capacity of FDM depends mainly on the frequency reuse distance while the capacity of CDM is limited by the self users interference. This work shows that the capacity ratio of duplex and simplex FDM systems depends on the cell dimensions. It also shows that considering ATC requirements, FDM provides a higher capacity than CDM for all the cell dimension ranges considered.