Wide Area Multilateration Evaluation Test Bed using USRP Based ADS-B Receiver

S-S. Jan, S-L. Jheng, A-L. Tao

Abstract:	The development and implementation of Communication, Navigation, Surveillance, and Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) for civil aviation have attracted a lot of attentions, because CNS/ATM changes the current analog aviation system to the modern digital aviation system. The enabling technology of this CNS/ATM system is the Global Positioning System (GPS), for example, the time synchronization of the air data network and the air communication network, and aircraft navigation for approach and landing. If GPS experiences intentional or unintentional interference, there would be a significant impact on the normal operation of the CNS/ATM. Therefore, the United States’ 2010 Federal Radionavigation Plan and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) clearly indicates that an Alternative Position, Navigation and Timing (APNT) system should be developed to maintain CNS/ATM operations for the periods with GPS outages. The objective of this work is thus to research and develop a Wide Area Multilateration (WAM) evaluation test bed which could provide the navigation information for civil aviation users during severe GPS failure and outage. In this work, the Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) method is used as our positioning algorithm, and the signal of opportunity under consideration is the ADS-B radio link. There are two ADS-B radio standards, and they are ADS-B Mode S (1090 MHz) and UAT (978 MHz). Due to these two different standards, we would need a reconfigurable receiver with some flexibility to fit our research and development needs. As a result, we will first conduct research on the use of a software defined radio (SDR) approach to develop an ADS-B SDR receiver based on the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), and we then provide detailed discussions on the configurations of the external hardware setup in order to form a WAM evaluation test bed, for instance, the time synchronization scheme between each experimental equipment. Also, the detailed analysis of the signal processing parameter changes and their corresponding performance evaluations will be presented in the paper to demonstrate the feasibility of the developed system. In addition, in order to support the CNS/ATM operations for one specific air space, we will also investigate the APNT service volume under different system configurations. Finally, we will develop a WAM evaluation test bed using USRP based ADS-B receiver and present its real performance evaluation results in this paper as well.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 26th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2013) September 16 - 20, 2013 Nashville Convention Center, Nashville, Tennessee Nashville, TN
Pages:	274 - 281
Cite this article:	Jan, S-S., Jheng, S-L., Tao, A-L., "Wide Area Multilateration Evaluation Test Bed using USRP Based ADS-B Receiver," Proceedings of the 26th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2013), Nashville, TN, September 2013, pp. 274-281.
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