  To meet the exponentially increasing air traffic, L-band (960-1164 MHz)
digital aeronautical communication system (LDACS) has been introduced. The
LDACS aims to exploit the vacant spectrum between incumbent Distance Measuring
Equipment (DME) signals and envisioned to follow an orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing (OFDM) approach to support high-speed delay-sensitive
multimedia services. This paper deals with the design and implementation of
end-to-end LDACS the transceiver on the Zynq System on Chip platform,
consisting of FPGA as programmable logic (PL) and ARM as processing system
(PS). We consider OFDM based LDACS and improve it further using windowing
and/or filtering. We propose a hardware-software co-design approach and analyze
various transceiver configurations by dividing it into PL and PS. We
demonstrate the flexibility offered by such a co-design approach to choose the
configuration as well as word-length for a given area, delay and power
constraints. The transceiver is also integrated with the programmable analog
front-end to validate its functionality in the presence of various RF
impairments and wireless channels and interference specific to the LDACS
environment. Via in-depth performance analysis concerning parameters such as
out-of-band attenuation, DME interference, bit-error-rate, word-length, and
complexity, we demonstrate wide bandwidth filtered OFDM as an attractive
solution for the next generation LDACS.
