Scenarios and system configuration analyses of LDACS-SUR and DARN for validation campaign in the ASTONISH project

Nowadays, many countries are phasing out the only source of non-cooperative surveillance services - the primary surveillance radars. Moreover, the cooperative surveillance technologies, Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR), Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B), and Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) all use the congested 1030 MHz and 1090 MHz frequency bands, making the secondary surveillance services vulnerable to outage and unavailability, in addition to the possible failures of the airborne transponders. To address these issues, two ground-based non-cooperative surveillance alternatives are considered: 1) a passive multistatic radar employing the L-Band Digital Aeronautical Communication System (LDACS) transmitters as illuminators of opportunity, and 2) a distributed active radar network. The scenarios considered for the validation of these approaches, as well as the analyses conducted to define the ground system configurations considered in such validations are presented in this work.