Optimal MLAT Tracking Based on Improved Simulation for Airport Surveillance

Abstract: MLAT (Multilateration) is becoming one of the leading techniques in the airport surveillance. It locates the positions of aircrafts by the TDOAs (Time Difference of Arrivals) of signal from the aircraft to the different remote stations. In views of the influence from the geometric relation and the clock error among different stations, an improved simulation is proposed to estimate the measurement error for the optimal tracking. The model of simulation takes both the GDOP (Geometric Dilution of Precision) and TOA (Time of Arrival) error into consideration. Experiment results show that compared with the traditional simulation method, the improved simulation is more accurate and is able to be used in the practical application.