Reception capacity enhancement of satellite-based AIS for different classes of ships

Satellite based ´Automatic Identification System´ (AIS) for global maritime applications is being highly investigated in recent years. A receiver of such a system receives simultaneous transmissions from different self organized areas, which may lead to collision of information received at satellite; thereby reduce the scope of detection. In this paper we investigate the reception performance for class-A and class-B ships moving together with different reporting rates in the observation area. Comparisons of performances for various orbital configurations have been shown for a space based observational scheme and it is observed that reception capacity can be enhanced using constellation of satellites rather than using single satellite.