Mode S Cluster Operation

Project Description

Due to growing necessity of ATC redundancy and safety increasing, the Secondary Surveillance Systems deployment has been increased during last years. This fact is directly related with:

• Problems produced by the high radio-electric pollution (especially in high traffic density areas, like the called “core area” in Europe) due to the high radar concentration deployed currently and overlapped coverage between them.
• Restrictions in current (and future) Mode S radars deployment, because of limited interrogator codes available to be assigned by Eurocontrol.

The main objective of “Mode S Cluster Operation” is to carry out investigation tasks over Indra Mode S Secondary Radar and make a prototype of MSSR Mode S Interrogator element in order to provide it with cluster operation with up 5 radars more, according to European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation (Eurocontrol)

That radars network working in cluster make possible:

• Limit problems produced by high radio-electric pollution due to the high radar concentration deployed currently and overlapped coverage between them. Whereas stand-alone operation, every radar has to interrogate with all-call interrogations so as to acquire every aircraft. During cluster operation, the aircraft information is transferred through network between stations. That is the reason why aircrafts acquisitions are not needed when they are within radar coverage.
• Make up for possible detection misses, taking additional Mode S data from near stations
• In the case of radar failure, adjacent stations can reconfigure their coverage area according to a pre-programmed scheme, just like limit the number of non-covered areas.
• Minimise the derived problems of limit number of available interrogator codes assigned by the European regulatory organisation (Eurocontrol). This allows completing the current (and future) deployment of Mode S radars without any performance restriction, because it will be able to assign the same II code to every station within the same cluster.

Collaborating Companies or Organisations

Indra's Role

• Analyse and research deeply Eurocontrol documentation about coordinated surveillance functionality, with the objective of making a compatible design with current Indra Mode S Radar architecture.
• From previous design, develop a prototype based on MSSR Mode S Interrogator, supplying it with the feature of coordination and cooperation with other Mode S radars via network (Cluster network).

Technologies used

• C and C++ programming languages.
• vxWorks OS, real time embedded system oriented.
• FPGA Virtex4FX100 with embedded PWPC.
• QT Framework under Linux OS.

More information

This project, under reference nº TSI-100101-2013-151, has been co-financed by MINETUR (Spanish Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism) within 2014 AEESD (Acción Estratégica de Economía y Sociedad Digital 2014) Call.