Abstract The future aeronautical communication system will have to provide more communications capacity and increased capabilities than the existing one. These systems should be able to provide the performance required in the long term. The improvements are necessary to be able to cope with the expected air traffic growth in future. In this paper we deal with the development of new algorithms for the new generation of communication systems based on digital signal processing. The main idea is to automate the design procedure starting from the block diagram of the system and carrying out the implementation code on the target hardware. The role and importance of symbolic computation in communication systems is exemplified on OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). An original approach to algorithm development is illustrated using computer algebra system. The development tools are Mathematica, and application software SchematicSolver.