From Analogue Broadcast Radio Towards End-to-End Communication
Horst Hering, Konrad Hofbauer · 2008
The capacity of the current ATC system is, among other factors, limited by the maximum number of aircraft that a controller can handle in a sector. This led in the past to a decrease of sector sizes in order to increase capacity. We study in this paper the impact of small sectors on the air-ground radio communication. Small sectors require a large number of radio channels, and the sector handovers generate multiple radio calls, which are workload for both controllers and pilots. We outline in this context an initial idea to make the control sectors transparent for the aircrew. With a network of radio base stations and reduced transmission powers a cell-based end-to-end communication system can potentially be established, without changing from analogue to digital radio. The aircraft transmits on the same frequency across all sectors, and the ground network routes the voice calls to the appropriate controllers. We briefly discuss potential benefits and issues of this concept and see a clear need for further research to determine the feasibility of this idea. I.