5G & Aircraft Safety

Simulation is Key to Ensuring Passenger Safety

Shawn Carpenter | Program Director, 5G & Space |Ansys

The new 5G C-band service is now up and running in the U.S., and subscribers are finally starting to see some of the promise of 5G. The new C-band services are primarily in spectrum allocations between 3 and 4 GHz, providing the wider channel allocation bandwidths necessary to deliver significantly higher data throughput. At the same time, signals at this frequency can travel significantly farther than with the mm-wave band. AT&T and Verizon customers are reporting download speeds ranging from 400 megabits per second (Mbps) to as much as 800 Mbps, a nearly 10x improvement over 4G LTE systems.

Starting July 5 2022, the telecom service providers are expected to energize the C-band service towers for enhanced 5G service closer to, and perhaps including, the airport campuses. Between January and July, the telecom service providers and the FAA will presumably have negotiated and settled on the acceptable parameters of operation for those new C-band 5G base stations. In addition, it is expected that the FAA will have completed re-certification of the radar altimeters that are currently in use throughout the aviation industry and their interactions with closer 5G towers.

System interference involves both in-band and out-of band emissions from the offending transmitters to the victim receivers. Quantifying interference can either be done through extensive testing of installed systems or considered through simulation. In this article, we’ll consider a simulation of a dynamic landing scenario at a U.S. airport to examine the potential of both in-band and out-of-band interference.

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