Application of maritime AIS (Automatic Identification System) to ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance — Broadcast) transceiver

International Maritime Organization (IMO) recommends the installation of an Automatic Identification System (AIS) according to requirements by SOLAS to avoid maritime collision. The AIS provides traffic information of other ships that may be used for maritime traffic control, SAR (Search and Rescue) and collision avoidance to apply safety management. In this paper, preliminary results to implement an aeronautical surveillance transceiver using AIS transceiver based on ADS-B concepts are described. Although altitude information is not required for AIS since the AIS is operated at MSL (Mean Sea Level), altitude information can be extracted by a GPS (Global Positioning System) chip-set in the AIS transceiver. ADS-B transceiver is implemented by defining a surveillance message format including the altitude information and modifying SOTDMA (Self-Organizing Time Division Multiple Access) protocol. Flight tests are performed to verify the implementation results.