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 tech- nologies, Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR), Automatic De- pendent 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 alterna- tives 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 are presented in this work. Additionally, several analyses based on the numerical evaluation of the Cramer-Rao Bound and the signal coverage are conducted to define the ground system configurations to be considered in such validations.