Feasibility Analysis of LDACS Ground Station Planning in China Based on a Hybrid Approach of Elitist Ant System and Tabu Search

Abstract

The L-band digital aeronautical communication system (LDACS) is a forthcoming high-throughput air–ground datalink that plays an important role in supporting the modernization of the air traffic management network. The LDACS is allocated to operate in the frequency band of 960–1164 MHz, provided that it does not cause any harmful effects on legacy systems operating in the same band. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the feasibility of LDACS deployment under compatibility constraints. This article focuses on the frequency assignment for the deployment of the LDACS network in China while adhering to conservative compatibility constraints with distance measuring equipment (DME). The strategy for assigning frequencies to LDACS ground stations (GSs) without adversely affecting the performance of the DME infrastructure is first described. Subsequently, combinational optimization problems are formulated to minimize the cochannel interference within the LDACS network and improve the utilization of spectrum resources. A hybrid approach consisting of the elitist ant system (EAS) and Tabu search is proposed for LDACS forward link frequency assignment. A dynamic heuristic information calculation method and an adaptive neighbor search module are included in the proposed approach to enhance the optimization performance. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated through experiments based on the distribution of DME stations and Very High Frequency Digital Link Mode 2 stations in China. The results demonstrate that compared to the original EAS algorithm, the proposed approach has a superior ability to escape from the local minimum, thus providing an assignment solution not only without any cochannel interference but also with less frequency resource occupation. With the proposed effective frequency assignment solutions, the feasibility is proved to deploy LDACS GSs in China with no interference with DME.