LDACS1-based non-cooperative surveillance

In civil aviation, Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) is expected to become the main surveillance technology. Nevertheless, to ensure that accurate surveillance services can be provided when failures of this cooperative surveillance system occur or when non-cooperative aircraft localization is required, a backup system needs to be made available. This paper addresses this problem using the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar technology. Specifically, we propose to reuse the infrastructure and signals of the future L-band digital aeronautical communications system type 1 (LDACS1) for implementing a MIMO radar with widely distributed antennas. In its broad interpretation, a MIMO radar represents a multiple antenna radar system able to send arbitrary waveforms from each transmit antenna and to jointly process the target returns received at multiple receiving sites. For the purpose of this work, a MIMO radar configuration with widely separated transmit and receive antennas is of interest. One key advantage of this configuration arises from its distributed nature, which allows for the target to be simultaneously “seen” from different angles. The resulting spatial diversity gain can be used to improve the target detection and parameter estimation process.