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Enhanced AIS receiver design for satellite reception

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Abstract

The possibility to detect Automatic Identification System (AIS) messages from low earth orbit (LEO) satellites paves the road for a plurality of new and unexplored services. Besides worldwide tracking of vessels, maritime traffic monitoring, analysis of vessel routes employing big data, and oceans monitoring are just few of the fields, where satellite-aided AIS is beneficial. Designed for ship-to-ship communication and collision avoidance, AIS satellite reception performs poorly in regions with a high density of vessels. This calls for the development of advanced satellite AIS receivers able to improve the decoding capabilities. In this context, our contribution focuses on the introduction of a new enhanced AIS receiver design and its performance evaluation. The enhanced receiver makes use of a coherent receiver for the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region, while for medium to high SNRs, a differential Viterbi receiver is used. Additional novelty of our work is in the exploitation of previously decoded packets from one vessel that is still under the LEO reception range, to improve the vessel detection probability. The assessment of the performance against a common receiver is done making the use of a simple and tight model of the medium access (MAC) layer and the multi-packet reception (MPR) matrix for physical layer (PHY) representation. Performance results show the benefits of such enhanced receiver, especially when it is bundled with successive interference cancellation (SIC).

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Notes

  1. SOTDMA is in fact the the most used out of four access schemes foreseen in AIS. A vessel implementing it, broadcasts its position, velocity and direction along with other data. In order to distribute up-to-date information to neighbouring vessels, messages are sent more often as the ship speed increases, resulting in 4 possible frequencies of packet transmission. For more details on SOTDMA, refer to [2, 10].

  2. Slot synchronicity is assumed for clarity in the analysis. In the real system, packets belonging to different vessels far apart will be received with a certain relative time delay that can impact the performance. Nevertheless, it has to be noted that the time diversity introduced by the relative time delay can help the detection and channel estimation as well as the SIC procedure. In this regard, slot synchronicity at the LEO satellite may be seen as a worst case assumption with respect to the actual system performance. Finally, the time difference between packets coming from vessels far from each other is in the other of at maximum 6 ms assuming a footprint of 2500 km and an LEO orbit of 524 km, which is anyhow limited with respect to an AIS slot duration, i.e., 26.67 ms.

  3. Equation (5) has been corrected with respect to the one in [15], due to minor imprecisions.

  4. Concretely, in [9], a data set was used corresponding to a 46 min long recording during a flight over the North Sea. A total of 58,000 AIS messages, where decoded, out of which \(94\;\%\) were position reports.

  5. The value of some of these bits cannot be always predicted with total certainty (with probability 1) (see [9] for more details).

  6. This number varies from 3 to 7 consecutive frames according to [2].

  7. We are here implicitly approximating the interference as a Gaussian r.v. with zero mean and variance related to the interference power. This is valid especially when multiple packets are colliding in a given slot.

  8. The throughput gain definition follows [12] as \(\xi =(S_{SIC}/ S_{C})-1.\)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Communications and Navigation, Wessling, Germany

    Federico Clazzer, Francisco Lázaro & Simon Plass

Authors
  1. Federico Clazzer
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  2. Francisco Lázaro
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  3. Simon Plass
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simon Plass.

Additional information

The research leading to these results has been carried out under the framework of the project “R&D for the maritime safety and security and corresponding real time services”. The project started in 2013 and is led by the Program Coordination Defence and Security Research within the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

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Clazzer, F., Lázaro, F. & Plass, S. Enhanced AIS receiver design for satellite reception. CEAS Space J 8, 257–268 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12567-016-0122-8

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