On the Design of Variable Filtered-OFDM Based LDACS for Future Generation Air-to-Ground Communication System

L-band digital aeronautical communication system (LDACS) has been newly presented for air-to-ground communication (A2GC) environment which is essentially based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme. This brief presents an innovative variable filtered-OFDM (VF-OFDM) based LDACS with the aid of variable digital filter utilizing the theory of Farrow structure and innovative interpolated band-pass method. Experimental observation has demonstrated that the resultant response of the filter satisfies the standard specification of LDACS spectral mask for different interpolation factors. It has also been shown that proposed VF-OFDM based LDACS system exhibits superior performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) and power spectral density (PSD) when compared to OFDM and F-OFDM based LDACS. Finally, superiority of the suggested architecture has been established by implementing it on Cyclone IV FPGA board.