Verifying required communication performance in air traffic management

Abstract

Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics Special Committee 214 and European Organisation for Civil Aviation Equipment Working Group 78 were tasked to develop performance-based air traffic control data communications Standardsforeventualglobaluse.Akeyrequirementofairtrafficcontroldatacommunicationsisrequiredcommunication performance, which is composed of communication technical performance, pilot response time, and initiator time, each of which is characterized by two percentile requirements, measured at the 95th and 99.9th percentiles on a distribution. Verifying that a communication system complies with these communication performance requirements is important to the civil aviation agencies using the communication service, communication service providers, operation approvers, and system certifiers. This paper presents a methodology that can be used to verify whether a communication system complies with the corresponding performance requirements and allows for the balancing of the false alarm rate, missed detection rate, and sample size in the performance verification. A significant amount of research on this methodology was conducted, and a large amount of data was analyzed using this method. This percentile verification methodology was adopted by Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics Special Committee 214/European Organisation for Civil Aviation Equipment Working Group 78 in their Baseline 2 Data Communications Standards Initial Release.