Aircraft Identification
Tag demonstrated at ATC Maastricht
The presentation of Aircraft
Identification Tag (AIT) drew many visitors at the ATC Maastricht 2005
exhibition. The AIT concept received the Jane’s ‘Innovation Award’ at ATC
Maastricht in 2004.
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Horst Hering, initiator of AIT,
demonstrates the concept to EUROCONTROL’s Director General, Mr. Victor
Aguado. |
AIT automatically embeds
an unnoticeable digital watermark in the analogue voice signal transmitted over
standard VHF channels. The watermark represents a digital signature and allows
automatic identification of the originator of the voice message. AIT offers major
benefits for safety and security in air transportation. See Eurocontrol
Experimental Centre News, December 2003.
A
feasibility study was performed by the Signal Processing and Speech
Communication Laboratory of the Graz University of Technology (TUG). EEC
Note 5-2005 publishes details of the resulting demonstrator which was shown
at ATC Maastricht. In collaboration with TUG further research is being conducted
by PhD student Konrad Hofbauer to improve AIT (see below). This research is
concentrating on the trade-off between capacity, inaudibility and reliability.
The challenge is to increase payload data capacity without negatively influencing
the other parameters.
Beside
the digital signature AIT could embed a position report (e.g. from a GPS) as
payload data. This would be extremely useful in areas without radar coverage
(e.g. oceanic flights, airfields for general aviation …). Furthermore, AIT
potentially opens a way to apply adaptive channel equalisation techniques, in
order to increase the intelligibility of the voice communication. These
techniques already improve digital communications such as GSM. Similar
techniques might be applied to analogue radio.
In mid-March EEC staff will meet with
representatives from several domains at EUROCONTROL headquarters to initiate
stakeholder consultation and to consider further feasibility actions. In parallel industrial partners are being
sought to support the AIT concept and to develop applications. EEC
Note 4-2005 describes some possible technical solutions for an AIT
application in the cockpit of commercial aircraft.
For information contact: horst.hering@eurocontrol.int or konrad.hofbauer@eurocontrol.int
Links
PhD
Topics, Konrad Hofbauer