Capacity of a Umts System for Aeronautical Communications

Current Air Traffic Management and Air Traffic Control systems will experience a demand increase in the following years due to the large number of operating aircrafts. As a consequence, new solution must be studied to overcome this capacity limitation without affecting the performance of such critical services. This paper presents the STAR demonstrator, a project of the European 6 FP whose aim is to show the feasibility of using UMTS W-CDMA for ATM services. One of the advantages of using W-CDMA technology is an increase in the capacity of the system as compared to existing legacy systems. The contribution is focused on the analysis of the system capacity, and simulation results show the increase as compared to legacy analogue systems. Key-Words: UMTS, W-CDMA, ATM, ATC, SDR, Capacity, Air Traffic, ENR, TMA