In this paper, an effective procedure to emplace standard and enhanced mode-S multilateration stations for airport surveillance is studied and developed. This procedure is based on meta-heuristic optimization techniques, such as genetic algorithm (GA), and is intended to obtain useful parameters for an optimal system configuration that provides acceptable performance levels. Furthermore, the procedure developed here is able to evaluate and improve previous system designs, as well as possible system enhancements. Additionally, the design strategies to be used along with the procedure proposed here are fully described. Parameters such as the number of stations, the system geometry, the kind of measurements to be used, and the system accuracy are obtained taking into account the basic requirements such as the Line of Sight, the probability of detection, and the accuracy levels.

The aim of this study is to increase the capacity of the 1090 MHz secondary surveillance radar (SSR) channel by novel transmission and decoding techniques. In particular, multilateration stations have omni-directional antennae; hence considering aircraft traffic and including the extension of surveillance to cooperating vehicles, the reception of superimposed signals is more and more probable. We propose mitigating this problem by combining frequency agility and source separation techniques; we analyze the pertaining channel capacity improvement, and then evaluate the detection and timing estimation for frequency-shifted and separated signals.