On the feasibility of indoor broadband secondary access to 960-1215 MHz aeronautical spectrum.

In this paper, we analyse the feasibility of indoor broadband service provisioning using secondary spectrum access to the 960-1215MHz band, primarily allocated to the distance measuring equipment (DME) system for aeronautical navigation. We propose a practical secondary sharing scheme customised to the characteristics of the DME. Because 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 a large number of secondary users are able to operate in adjacent DME channels without harming the primary system even with limited accuracy on the estimation of the propagation loss. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.