Air Traffic Surveillance Using IP-Based Space Information Network

The commercial aviation industry mainly relies on ground-based radar system for air traffic surveillance. This traditional system has a fundamental shortcoming of limited coverage. The outcome of this limitation is expensive nonlinear airplane routing, inefficient utilization of air space, incidents like missing airplane and damaged black box that results in mystery about the cause of the accident, etc. In the recent decade, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) technology is considered for deployment by international aviation authorities as an advance alternate. The space-based ADS-B is recently considered more promising & useful than ground-based ADS-B. Owing to many advantages over the existing radar-based system, it is anticipated by the aviation industry to switch from radar-based system to ADS-B eventually. However, we have highlighted that even space-based ADS-B have some limitations that will prevent it from becoming a single surveillance system for ATC, and restricts it to be only additional support for the existing surveillance system. With the help of our recently proposed Space Air Ground Information Network (SAGIN), we have enlightened that utilization of space information network can resolve not only all these limitations but also aviation industry can be revolutionized.