Requirements for Communication Systems in Future Passenger Air Transportation

Abstract

The Airports Council International (ACI) estimates that the number of global passengers will increase from over 5 billion passengers today to 12 billion by 2031. At the same time, major aircraft (A/C) manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus estimate that the worldwide commercial A/C fleet will increase 5% per year over the next 20 years, i.e. the commercial aviation market will be doubled. This growth will require not only new airports infrastructure but also investments in en-route and Air Traffic Management (ATM) systems. Part of such investments must be aimed to a growth in the capacity of the onboard communication systems. With increasing speed of Internet connections on land, passengers expect not only to be connected to the Internet but also to have good connectivity with high bandwidth to enable them the access and use of multitude applications during the flight. The need to be connected adds to the increased passenger traffic and even the implementation of new aviation standards such as: Controller-Pilot Data Link Communications (CPDLC), Future Air Navigation System (FANS), Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), VHF Data Link mode 2/3/4 (VDL2/3/4), etc. Governmental initiatives such as NextGen in U.S.A. and Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR) in Europe are forcing aviation companies to fulfill these needs to satisfy their customers while complying with regulations in different airspaces. As a result, the aviation industry faces a new paradigm in the communication system requirements, which is the subject of this paper. As a first requirement, the industry must be prepared for seamlessly adoption of future communication systems, standards, or regulation without this implying the continuous installation of new equipment, but rather the modification of the existing one. Today, any modernization of these systems represents a major change in airborne and on-land equipment, which means buying new equipment, installation of new antennas on the A/C, etc. The main repercussions of this lack of flexibility and scalability are that many of the systems currently used have become obsolete, their modernization, when possible, is highly constrained by previous limitations, and new deployments are painfully long. Therefore, the modernization of the onboard communication systems has to be flexible enough to address all these drawbacks. This paper also discusses several Requirements for Communication Systems in Future Passenger Air Transportation (RCSFPAT). Requirements like the bandwidth, which will depend on factors that cannot yet be predicted accurately (amount of increase in air traffic, capabilities of service providers, etc.). The two primary drivers for the RCSFPAT are: 1) to provide an appropriate communication infrastructure to support future air communication systems growth, and 2) to provide a consistent global solution to support the goal of fulfilling the communications requirements from passengers and communications between A/C Earth Stations (AESs) and Ground Earth Stations (GESs) thus to ensure flight safety. In order to provide worldwide coverage of the communication systems, the only current technology able to cover the oceanic regions is Satellite Communications (SatCom). Indeed, most of the airlines and A/C manufactures have signed