Nanosecond-precision Time-of-Arrival Estimation for Aircraft Signals with low-cost SDR Receivers

Abstract

Precise Time-of-Arrival (TOA) estimations of aircraft and drone signals are important for a wide set of applications including aircraft/drone tracking, air traffic data verification, or self-localization. Our focus in this work is on TOA estimation methods that can run on low-cost software-defined radio (SDR) receivers, as widely deployed in Mode S / ADS-B crowdsourced sensor networks such as the OpenSky Network. We evaluate experimentally classical TOA estimation methods which are based on a cross-correlation with a reconstructed message template and find that these methods are not optimal for such signals. We propose two alternative methods that provide superior results for real-world Mode S / ADS-B signals captured with low-cost SDR receivers. The best method achieves a standard deviation error of 1.5 ns.

Comment: IPSN 2018

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• http://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07016

• http://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07016

• http://xplorestaging.ieee.org/ielx7/8432383/8480023/08480078.pdf?arnumber=8480078,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ipsn.2018.00055

• https://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/journals/corr/corr1802.html#abs-1802-07016,

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.07016.pdf,

http://eprints.networks.imdea.org/1768,

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8480078,

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3208002,

https://academic.microsoft.com/#/detail/2789070679