ADS-B service volume engineering: designing an efficient radio station layout while meeting stringent radar interference levels

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To ensure and meet the future needs of the growing civil and commercial aviation community, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has undertaken the development of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). This paper presents the radio site layout design approach in support of the FAA's Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) the cornerstone of NextGen. The radio site layout must be optimised to meet system performance, safety, and interference requirements while minimising the number of radio sites. In this paper, we show a practical way to achieve this optimality by developing an advanced technique such as reverse radio line-of-site (RLOS). Given that numerous radars are clustered together, we can optimise radio site selection through a process of coverage aggregation. This optimisation process across the USA's National Air Space (NAS) significantly reduces the total number of radio sites required for complete coverage.