Hardware/software Co-design of the decoding chain in an air traffic communication receiver

Abstract

Current air traffic communication systems are mainly based on voice communication, whereby a newer digital communication technology called L-Band Digital Aeronautical Communication System (LDACS) is currently being researched as part of the European Commission project Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research (SESAR). As part of this new communication infrastructure, encoding and decoding guarantees reliable data transport with the ability to correct errors that have occurred during data transmission. In particular, decoding tasks are usually computationally intensive and require an effective decoding strategy to ensure real-time decoding of the received data packets. Since the receiver should be implemented on an embedded system, a heterogeneous implementation combining software and hardware-implemented decoding parts should be preferred. In order to solve the problem of real-time decoding, a hardware/software co-design of all necessary functional system parts was chosen as the design method for this thesis project in order to ensure that a resulting implementation can meet the requirements of the system. Therefore, the design process was first carried out in which decoding tasks were assigned to an implementation domain, i.e. the hardware domain implemented as an FPGA module or the software domain, followed by the actual implementation of the system. Finally, the resulting decoding structure was simulated and verified to demonstrate compliance with the LDACS standard, using test data from a reference system to learn more about system characteristics such as error correction capability and maximum decoding data throughput. The resulting system shows high performance decoding where the desired decoding quality and speed requirements can be achieved for the use in the LDACS communication system. In addition, it is shown that the chosen scientific design method and the associated implementation is suitable for the real-time decoding of data, whereby the concepts used can also be transferred to other possible systems.