Pulse-Pair Interference Automatic Detection and Mitigation for L-Band Aeronautical Communication System

Abstract

Pulse-pairs (PP) generated by distance measuring equipment (DME) cause severe interference to the L-band digital aeronautical communication systems. Unlike previous works that mainly improved receiver structure for mitigating the DME interference, this paper proposes a novel and practical time domain PP mitigation method without changing the existing receiver structure. Our method is composed of three parts and utilizes a specific property, i.e., a relatively fixed waveform of DME PP. First, the complex-valued waveform of PP is automatically detected through an iterative weighted average method. Then, on the basis of the detected PP waveform, each PP is reconstructed according to its amplitude, position, and initial phase, which are estimated through a sparse representation algorithm. Finally, the reconstructed PPs are subtracted from the contaminated signal. Numerical experiments show that compared with recently published methods the bit error rate obtained by our method is approximately 5 dB better, while the complexity is maintained at the same level.

Keywords

DME interference / OFDM / Waveform auto-detection / Iterative weighted average / Sparse representation

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