On the Feasibility of Indoor Broadband Secondary Access to 960-1215 MHz Aeronautical Spectrum

TL;DR

This paper investigates the potential for indoor broadband secondary access to the 960-1215 MHz aeronautical spectrum band, proposing a scheme that manages interference to enable secondary use without compromising primary safety functions.

Contribution

It introduces a practical secondary sharing scheme tailored to DME characteristics, ensuring protection from harmful interference while allowing large-scale secondary access.

Findings

Secondary users can operate without harming primary DME system.

Limited accuracy in propagation loss estimation still allows many secondary users.

Interference control thresholds effectively protect primary system safety.

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the feasibility of indoor broadband service provisioning using secondary spectrum access to the 960-1215 MHz band, primarily allocated to the distance measuring equipment (DME) system for aeronautical navigation. We propose a practical secondary sharing scheme customized to the characteristics of the DME. Since the primary system performs a safety-of-life functionality, protection from harmful interference becomes extremely critical. The proposed scheme controls aggregate interference by imposing an individual interference threshold on the secondary users. We examine the feasibility of large scale secondary access in terms of the transmission probability of the secondary users that keeps the probability of harmful interference below a given limit. Uncertainties in the estimation of propagation loss and DME location affect the feasibility of the secondary access. Numerical results show that large number of secondary users are able to operate in adjacent DME channels without harming the primary system even with limited accuracy in the estimation of the propagation loss.