Radiolocation and tracking of automatic identification system signals

The Automatic Identification System (AIS) is becoming a cornerstone of maritime situational awareness. Nevertheless, AIS suffers the lack of security measures that makes it prone to receiving vessel positions that are unintentionally incorrect, jammed or deliberately falsified. In this work we consider the processing of Time Difference of Arrival measurements from a network of AIS base stations using a classic radio-localisation method and an Extended Kalman Filter in geodetic coordinates. The approach is validated using anonymous real AIS data collected by multiple base stations that partly share coverage areas. The localization results show the operational potential for AIS data validation.