L-band Digital Aeronautical Communication System type-1 (L-DACS1) is anemerging standard that aims at enhancing air traffic management (ATM) bytransitioning the traditional analog aeronautical communication systems to thesuperior and highly efficient digital domain. L-DACS1 employs modern andefficient orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulationtechnique to achieve more efficient and higher data rate in comparison to theexisting aeronautical communication systems. However, the performance of OFDMsystems is very sensitive to synchronization errors. L-DACS1 transmission is inthe L-band aeronautical channels that suffer from large interference and largeDoppler shifts, which makes the synchronization for L-DACS more challenging.This paper proposes a novel computationally efficient synchronization methodfor L-DACS1 systems that offers robust performance. Through simulation, theproposed method is shown to provide accurate symbol timing offset (STO)estimation as well as fractional carrier frequency offset (CFO) estimation in arange of aeronautical channels. In particular, it can yield excellentsynchronization performance in the face of a large carrier frequency offset.
展开▼
