A Photonics Based Intelligent Airport Surveillance and Tracking System

Airport terminals will increasingly require ubiquitous communications systems with high levels of computational power to provide the necessary intelligent automation to provide high quality services to passengers, stringent levels of safety and security that is as unobtrusive as possible, efficient processing of commercial goods and luggage, high quality information systems, airport transportation systems and appropriate support for in-house commercial ventures. These requirements will involve both fixed and mobile appliances, and hence an intelligent, adaptive, self-organizing and self-managing wired and wireless infrastructure will become an essential asset. This paper describes how The INtelligent Airport (TINA) project is therefore seeking to develop a new seamless wireless/wired ubiquitous infrastructure able to meet the above requirements. It will concentrate on how a passive RFID, using a radio over fiber-fed distributed antenna system can be used to provide location and tracking information on tagged assets over a wide area. By using the distributed antenna system, it is possible to suppress fading and nulls of the narrowband RFID channel and this allows the accuracy of RFID reads to be greatly improved and the area over which they can be read to be greatly increased. It also allows the use of the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) to provide a good measure of tag position.