In this work, we argue that current state-of-the-art methods of aircraft localization such as multilateration are insufficient, in particular for modern crowdsourced air traffic networks with random, unplanned deployment geometry. We propose an alternative, a grid-based localization approach using the k-Nearest Neighbor algorithm, to deal with the identified shortcomings. Our proposal does not require any changes to the existing air traffic protocols and transmitters, and is easily implemented using only low-cost, commercial-off-the-shelf hardware. Using an algebraic multilateration algorithm for comparison, we evaluate our approach using real-world flight data collected with our collaborative sensor network OpenSky. We quantify its effectiveness in terms of aircraft location accuracy, surveillance coverage, and the verification of false position data. Our results show that the grid-based approach can increase the effective air traffic surveillance coverage compared to multilateration by a factor of up to 2.5. As it does not suffer from dilution of precision, it is much more robust in noisy environments and performs better in pre-existing, unplanned receiver deployments. We further find that the mean aircraft location accuracy can be increased by up to 41 in comparison with multilateration while also being able to pinpoint the origin of potential spoofing attacks conducted from the ground.
Overall, the main (distributed) localization approach used within aviation is MLAT @cite_11 , which we discuss in detail in the next section and which provides the baseline for our evaluations. To the best of our knowledge the combination of the k-NN algorithm with TDoA as a primitive has not been studied. In the following, we argue that this combination is beneficial in particular for crowdsourced networks with random, imperfect system geometry in which the performance of MLAT suffers strongly.
@cite_11
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We consider the joint optimization of beamformers and linear receivers in a MIMO interference network. Each transmitter transmits a single beam corresponding to a rank-one precoder. When the number of users K is greater than the number of antennas at each terminal N, the maximum degrees of freedom is achieved via spatial interference alignment. Interference alignment is feasible for up to K = 2N−1 users, in which case there is a finite number of solutions to the alignment conditions. This number of solutions increases rapidly with N, and the solutions depend only on the cross-channel coefficients (i. e., they are independent of the direct channels). To maximize the achievable sum rate at high SNRs we therefore wish to select an aligned solution which is best matched to the direct channels. We evaluate the performance of this scheme for large K and N, assuming that the solution is the best out of a random subset of aligned solutions. We then compare numerically this performance with the performance of previously proposed numerical (e. g., forward-backward) techniques for optimizing beams, and a new technique which tracks the local optimum as the SNR is incrementally increased, similar to a homotopy method for improving convergence properties. We observe that the incremental technique typically achieves better performance than the previously proposed methods. Minimum-Latency Aggregation Scheduling (MLAS) is a problem of fundamental importance in wireless sensor networks. There however has been very little effort spent on designing algorithms to achieve sufficiently fast data aggregation under the physical interference model which is a more realistic model than traditional protocol interference model. In particular, a distributed solution to the problem under the physical interference model is challenging because of the need for global-scale information to compute the cumulative interference at any individual node. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm that solves the MLAS problem under the physical interference model in networks of arbitrary topology in O(K) time slots, where K is the logarithm of the ratio between the lengths of the longest and shortest links in the network. We also give a centralized algorithm to serve as a benchmark for comparison purposes, which aggregates data from all sources in O(log3n) time slots (where n is the total number of nodes). This is the current best algorithm for the problem in the literature. The distributed algorithm partitions the network into cells according to the value K, thus obviating the need for global information. The centralized algorithm strategically combines our aggregation tree construction algorithm with the non-linear power assignment strategy in [9]. We prove the correctness and efficiency of our algorithms, and conduct empirical studies under realistic settings to validate our analytical results. This paper experimentally compares the positioning accuracy of TDoA-based and RSS-based localization in a public outdoor LoRa network in the Netherlands. The performance of different Received Signal Strength (RSS)-based approaches (proximity, centroid, map matching,…) is compared with Time-Difference-of-Arrival (TDoA) performance. The number of RSS and TDoA location updates and the positioning accuracy per spreading factor (SF) is assessed, allowing to select the optimal SF choice for the network. A road mapping filter is applied to the raw location estimates for the best algorithms and SFs. RSS-based approaches have median and maximal errors that are limited to 1000 m and 2000 m respectively, using a road mapping filter. Using the same filter, TDoA-based approaches deliver median and maximal errors in the order of 150 m and 350 m respectively. However, the number of location updates per time unit using SF7 is around 10 times higher for RSS algorithms than for the TDoA algorithm. Aircraft detection from very high resolution (VHR) remote sensing images has been drawing increasing interest in recent years due to the successful civil and military applications. However, several challenges still exist: 1) extracting the high-level features and the hierarchical feature representations of the objects is difficult; 2) manual annotation of the objects in large image sets is generally expensive and sometimes unreliable; and 3) locating objects within such a large image is difficult and time consuming. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised learning framework based on coupled convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for aircraft detection, which can simultaneously solve these problems. We first develop a CNN-based method to extract the high-level features and the hierarchical feature representations of the objects. We then employ an iterative weakly supervised learning framework to automatically mine and augment the training data set from the original image. We propose a coupled CNN method, which combines a candidate region proposal network and a localization network to extract the proposals and simultaneously locate the aircraft, which is more efficient and accurate, even in large-scale VHR images. In the experiments, the proposed method was applied to three challenging high-resolution data sets: the Sydney International Airport data set, the Tokyo Haneda Airport data set, and the Berlin Tegel Airport data set. The extensive experimental results confirm that the proposed method can achieve a higher detection accuracy than the other methods.