Safety aeronautical communications by satellite: create < recycle? S-UMTS and GMR recycling

摘要

Air traffic predictions show a steady increase of flights in the next twenty years. Eurocontrol forecasts a traffic increase between 55% and 90% in the ECAC area. Current ATM procedures cannot cope with the predicted number of traffic. In order to deal with the increasing number of flights, ATM global concept needs to evolve. Strategic air traffic management will replace the tactical procedures. The interaction between the aircrafts and the air traffic control centers will be necessary to organize the traffic flow. Current voice communications cannot support the new communications requirements, so new communications systems must be investigated to fulfill the new communication services requirements. SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) proposed the operational concept at the end of the first phase of the program. This operational concept will rely on a dual link communications architecture composed by a terrestrial and a satellite system for EnRoute and TMA (Terminal Maneuvering Area). Current satellite systems do not seem well fitted to provide the requirements in terms of availability or latency, therefore, new systems must be proposed. Creating a new communications protocol could be a lot of work, so we propose to evaluate existing satellite protocols to evaluate their performance face to safety air communications.