SEPARATION OF MULTIPLE SECONDARY SURVEILLANCE RADAR SOURCES

IN A REAL ENVIRONMENT BY A NOVEL PROJECTION ALGORITHM

N. Petrochilos

G. Galati, L. Mene, E. Piracci

CReSTIC, University of Reims

Moulins de la Housse, BP 1039
51687 Reims Cedex 2, France
nicolas.petrochilos@univ-reimes.fr

DISP and V. VOLTERRA CENTER,

Tor Vergata University
Via del Politecnico, 1 - 00133 Roma, Italy
g.galati@ieee.org

ABSTRACT
Multilateration systems based on Secondary Surveillance
Radar (SSR) and omni-directional antennae are operational
today [1] with expected capacity limitations due to the increase of the air traffic. Assuming the replacement of the
omni-directional antenna by an array, we proposed new algorithms in previous works [2, 3]. Unfortunately, they have
some shortcomings, an expensive computational cost, and
a not-so simple practical implementation. Therefore, there
is a need for reliable, simple, effective algorithms such as
the one we present here to separate multiple SSR signals.
Real signals (as recorded in a live environment) are used to
demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

when approaching (or leaving) the airport area [1, 2]. The
increase of traffic in the SSR downlink channel, whose
nominal center frequency, i.e. 1090 MHz, is common to
SSR transponders of aircraft and vehicles, calls for new
techniques for separation of overlapped signals (i.e. SSR
replies and squitter) from different transponders.
reply
interrogation
reply
reply

1. INTRODUCTION
Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR) is essential for the
surveillance function in Air Traffic Control (ATC). Unlike
the primary radar, SSR establishes an air-ground communication (data link) thanks to the on-board transponder that
informs the ATC about the identity and the altitude of the
aircraft in the line of sight [4]. A ground-based SSR station sends a differential-phase modulated with a carrier at
1030 MHz, to interrogate an aircraft, eliciting a SSR reply
signal, i.e. a pulse-position modulated finite-length signal
at a carrier frequency of

MHz. The system, designed
in the 1950s, is currently limited by the fact that all replies
use nominally the same carrier frequency, and may overlap in time. The most used operational protocol of SSR is
the selective mode, or Mode S, in which the ground station selectively address the aircrafts and permit short data
communications between the station and the aircrafts [5].
Nonetheless, also in this protocol overlaps may occur in
some operating conditions at the

MHz channel such
as the acquisition of new incoming signals or unsolicited
replies called squitters.
SSR is becoming a fundamental tool for Communication and Surveillance in the Air Traffic Management (ATM)
and Airport Surface Movements Guidance and Control
(SMGCS), as it makes possible both standard and novel
applications. Among the latter there are the Multilateration
systems, as shown in Figure 1, which are more and more
used to detect and identify aircraft and vehicles on the airport surface [6] and, in their Wide Area version, aircraft

Fig. 1. The distributed SSR system.

Multilateration systems (both short range for airport
coverage and wide area) are basically distributed surveillance and identification systems, with some interrogators
and a network of receive-only stations in the surveillance
area or nearby in order to allow multi-lateration and enhance message detection. These systems rely on the estimation of time of arrival to perform intersection of hyperbolic surfaces. However, with distributed systems there is a
dramatic increase of the number of received replies per unit
time due to the use of an omnidirectional antenna. Usual receivers have a single antenna, and work on two-step basis:
preamble estimation for timing synchronization, then message decoding [7]. When replies (or squitter) overlap, very
often the message transmitted by the aircraft is corrupted
and cannot be recovered, nor the aircraft can be located and
identified.
As a matter of fact, todays resolution algorithms work
only when the degree of overlapping is very limited [7].
In order to guarantee better performance, it is possible
either to exploit the variation of the center frequency of the
on-board transponder [8] (it is due to tolerance, therefore it
is rather limited) or to use an array antenna, [2, 3, 9, 10, 11,
12].
The use of an array for SSR signals reception (and analysis by model-based algorithms) is a new solution that, in

front of the obvious increase of cost and complexity, permits, by adequate signal processing techniques, some interesting and operationally useful functions, such as:
a) Separation of overlapped signals (that is, multiple
sources) by beam forming ;
b) Estimate of the direction of arrival (DOA) for each
source.
The function (b) requires array calibration; this paper
only deals with function (a) with no need for calibration.
The algorithms proposed in [2, 3] suffer from limitations
due to the high computation burden; moreover, the analysis
was limited to the particular case of overlapping by an integer multiple of the symbol period, and of a sampling interval
equal to the symbol period.
In this work, a novel, array-based solution, free from
these limitations, is defined and evaluated; the analysis is
done using real-world SSR signals, received and recorded
by means of an ad-hoc system implemented and owned by
the Technical University of Delft (CAS/ IRCTR). This system is made up by a four-elements receive array connected
to a wide band digital acquisition system; thanks to it, a
large amount (hundreds) of signals has been recorded in
summer, 2003 [13].
The basic elements of the multiple-source separation
and processing with such an array are shown in Figure 2: an
elements (in the experiments,
 ) array is followed
by the separation block (based on a Projection algorithm i.e.
the main subject of this paper) and by detection (based on
the preamble part of the signal) and decoding (of the data
block part of the signal) .

Separation

Preamble Est.
Preamble Est.

Decoder

Decoder



Fig. 2. Block diagram of the system for separation and decoding of overlapped SSR Mode S signals.
This paper deals mainly with the problem of two Mode
S replies overlapping in times for real data. Mode A/C
replies (as Mode and Mode ) and their interactions will
be studied later. In [2, 3], we proposed two algebraic solutions that work with -rd or -th order tensors and require a
non-simple joint diagonalization at the end [14, 15]. Moreover, the simplest one, the Manchester Decoding Algorithm,
has been demonstrated not to properly work in the case of
small overlaps in time (i.e. large relative delays). In [12] (in
French), where we discovered that the sources cumulants of
order ,  and  have a large probability to be null, and we
also proposed a patch for the MDA for the case of small
overlap. It appears that this patch can cover almost  of
the cases, and is much suited to practical implementation to
a robust receiver, which is of interest for the radar industry.
The experimental platform that we designed in TU Delft
allowed us to collect a extensive library of real data [13].
This data set is used to demonstrate the projection algorithm
presented in this article, and compare its performances to

other algorithms (including the MDA) and to conventional

receiver processing.
2. DATA MODEL
The SSR communicates through two different kind of protocols: Mode A/C and Mode S. The A/C Mode was initiated
during world war II, and is supposed to be soon totally replaced by Mode S. For the sake of simplicity, we propose
a model only for Mode S replies, with a symbol period

s. This choice is motivated by the fact that Mode S
transponders are now mandatory, and by the complexity to
handle a combined model that contains both Mode A/C and
Mode S (different incommensurate pulse lengths).
A Mode S reply frame contains either  (short message) or
(extended length message) binary symbols .
The bits are encoded in a Manchester Encoding scheme,

is coded as
 
, and a
which means that a bit
bit
 as
 
. The emitted stream consists of
a preamble,
 





, followed by the
encoded data bits, i.e.,





       
  


length  



, corresponding

 

of a total



to


s. The preamble is aimed to facilitate the synchronization (detection of the start of a reply).
The Mode S reply signal emitted by the transponder has
the form

 

  






  


 


(1)

where   is the -th entry of , and  is a (nominally)

rectangular pulse of width 
 s.
Before being emitted by the antenna, the signal is upconverted to the frequency  . Nominally, the carrier frequency is  

MHz, but the tolerance permitted by
the ICAO is up to  MHz (presently reduced to  MHz),
thus    . Due to this carrier frequency mismatch, a
residual frequency remains after down-conversion by 
to baseband. This residual carrier adds a significant phase
rotation to the transmitted symbols: up to a complex gain,
the received baseband signal     is described as




   

   

  
(2)
where   

 is the phase shift due to the carrier
frequency shift over a sampling period.
We extend this model to the reception of  independent

source signals on an -element antenna array, assuming no

multipath. The array is an uniform linear array with the
inter-distance between the elements chosen as   
. The
baseband antenna signals are sampled at rate and stacked
in vectors   (size ). After collecting
samples, the
observation model is



  

(3)

  

  
 
    




where    
  is the  received signal
matrix.    
  is the  source matrix,

where      
   is a stacking of the
source signals (superscript denotes transpose).  is the

noise matrix, whose elements are temporally and
spatially white.  is the  mixing matrix that contains
the array signatures and the complex gains of the sources.
Note that  can be considered as an un-parameterized
matrix that can also reflect multipath, the imperfections of
the array such as calibration errors, coupling errors, or inaccuracies in the position of the elements. We only assume
the matrix  to have full column rank and so to be left.
invertible. We also assume that
Our aim is 1) to derive the beamformers   , 
, such that        is an estimate of the
-th SSR signal (superscript denotes complex conjugate
transpose). And 2) to assess with real data these beamformer by using a conventional receiver on the estimated
   (note that two indicators are given, the number of error
bits, and the number of Low Confidence Bit, which means
the confidence we have in each detected bit; a definition can
be found in [7]).

 




t1


 

56/112 microsecs

3.5 4.5

time in microsecs

t2

t3

t4

Fig. 3. Two Mode S overlapped replies.

The algorithm begins with the detection of the  s. The

data is sliced by times slots of


samples ( s), on each
time slot is performed a whiteness test [16] based on the singular value decomposition [17], see Figure 5. This allows
us to estimate the number of source as a function of time,
and to isolate the two time supports where each source is
single.
Be the notation 
 the matrix collecting the subset of
the columns related to the times
till
(selection of the
columns). Similarly, we define the notation 

 for the

0
6

10

12
5

x 10

Fig. 4. A recorded pair of overlapped replies (case W5).

SV

SV
SV  







Time

Fig. 5. The singular values, from the SVD, as a function of

time.

 . Then it


   
  



   

  


where the matrix 
 is the sub-matrix of  containing the
samples emitted in the time interval  
. Therefore 

contains only the first source and can be simplified as (resp.
for 
):


  
  





 





where the  s are the columns of , and the   s te rows
of .
Note that 
 and 

 are rank-one matrices in the
noiseless case. By a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)
  s, which
of the  s, we can estimate the main vectors
is the vector corresponding to the highest singular value.
 and

have been identiOnce the space signatures
fied, the matrix  is thus estimated. The space filters   s
are the rows of the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse of .
After separation, the estimation of the exact position of
the preamble is performed with a matched filter followed by
a zero-crossing detection of the derivative (from [7]). The
data is simply decoded as in conventional SSR Mode S processor by amplitude comparison.
Note that for totally overlapping replies, this algorithm
cannot separe the replies, therefore an other algorithm has
to be used, as for instance, the Manchester Decoding Algorithm [3] which is dedicated to this special case, but more
expensive computationally, and more tricky to implement
on hardware. The choice of which algorithm has to be used
can be done automatically by comparing the difference of
time of arrival  
 , with a pre-determined threshold.

3.5 4.5

0.01

We consider here the case of two Mode S signals overlapping (see Figure 3). The case of an overlap between a Mode
S and a Mode A/C has been taken care by the system design (see [4]), and thus is not under our consideration. The
algorithm is designed to take into account the case where
the MDA fails, namely when two Mode S replies have sigand
, and whose
nificantly different times of arrival,
difference is not an integer multiple of
 s. The times
support of the two sources is then partly overlapping, such
that at the beginning of the data record ( till
) there is
only one source present; and the end of the data (  till ),
only the other source is present (see for instance Figure 4).

0.02

subset of the columns related to the times  till

appears that we have the following relation:

3. PROJECTION ALGORITHM (PA)

0.03

8 microsecs

0.04

  

4. RESULTS
4.1. Real cases
We first consider the record named W5: using conventional
receiver and super-resolution receiver with one antenna,
this case presented a high number of Low Confidence Bit
(LCB): between  and . This case is presented as it has
the worst behavior from the set of cases that has been presented in [7].
0.4
SVD 1
SVD 2
SVD 3
SVD 4
Noise floor

0.35
0.3

the second source, using the conventional decoder. We have

also noticed that the Mode A/C is exactly super-imposed to
the preamble of the first source, and is also present on the
second channel.
All the real cases (
) have been tested with the projection algorithm and the technique was successful except in
two cases, for which the SNR is low ( and  dB) and the
conditioning number of  is too high (  and
). On most
of these cases the MDA failed due to the too large time delay between two arrivals. The low number of cases in the
database of the recorded signals does not allow us to estimate the limits of the algorithms (only one failure case),
therefore another kind of analysis is required.

SVD values

4.2. Semi-synthesized cases

0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0
40

20

20

40
times

60

80

100

120

Fig. 6. Detection test over case W5 (time in s).

The SVD values used for the detection test are presented
in Figure 6. The time till are shown by means of dotted
lines. Note that we also detect an hidden Mode A/C that
coincide exactly, by chance, with the preamble of the first
source, and the time of its ending is also shown with a
dotted line. The Mode A/C will alter the estimation of ,
but if we have a glance at Figure 7, we recognize that the

Preliminary studies performed at TU Delft on the earlier

prototypes have shown that the receivers have a good linearity for the considered dynamic range. Consequently, it is acceptable to consider the addition of two different time slots
containing different Mode S reply as almost areal case
[18]. The use of these semi-synthesized cases of overlapping Mode S replies allows us to carry on a general performance analysis of any algorithm on a very realistic (not just
simulated) signals. This method permits to select both the
SNR (by adding noise), and the time delay between sources.
Furthermore, as we know the individual replies, we also
know their message, and can perform a statistical analysis
of errors in decoding.
We compare our separation algorithm with other ones
(MDA [2, 3], JADE [19]), but also with the conventional
decoding algorithm presently used (SIR-S), and to the version with an adaptive filter presented in [7] (SIR-S+Filt.).
1
0.9

0.05

0.8

0.04

0.7
Failure rate

0.03
0.02
0.01
0
6

10

PA
JADE
MDA
SIRS
SIRS + Filt.

0.6
0.5
0.4

12
5

x 10

0.3

0.04

0.2

0.03

0.1
0
0

0.02

3
4
Time delay (s)

0.01

0
6

10

12

Fig. 8. The failure rate as a function of the time delay.

x 10

Fig. 7. Separation of case W5 (time in s).

separation is efficient, indeed we have found that after the
PA there remains only one Low Confidence Bit (LCB) for

First, we study the influence of the time delay between

the two replies. We keep fixed the power ratio between
sources equal to one, and the SNR of each source is equal to

dB. For this simulation, we have

 independent couples. A failure is declared if one of the two estimated reply

10

10
Failure rate

messages has more than

 bits wrong, because a redundancy code allows the processor to recover it for a lower
number of bit errors. Remind that the SIR-S based algorithms cannot cope more than one signal, and therefore the
results presented here are for the first signal only. First, note
that in Figure 8, JADE has a high failure rate (the reasons
can be found in [12]) and therefore, we do not consider it
anymore in the following, unless for some comparisons. As
well the SIR-S technique has a high failure rate, this is because this algorithm was not designed to receive two replies
at a time. The PA algorithm does not cope for too small
delays (below
s), which is very reasonable as the algorithm needs the replies not to overlap completely. The failure for the range  
 s are of the order the quantization limit (around


), but their averages over time
delay are respectively:


 for the conventional system,



 for the MDA, and


 for the PA, which has the
best overall rate.

 

PA
JADE
MDA
SIRS
SIRS + Filt.

10

15

20

25

SNR (dB)

Fig. 10. The failure rate as a function of the SNR.

From Figure 10, it clearly appears that JADE is not acceptable due to its high error rate. As well, the MDA and
the PA algorithm have much better performance than conventional systems. One remarkable point is that the PA has
a small loss (
) for SNR values bigger than  dB, while
for a single reply, usual receivers reach their conventional
operational limits at SNR values of
dB (or even more),
which shows inter alia the dB gain of a -elements array.

10
Average error number per reply

10

10

10

3
4
Time delay (s)

Fig. 9. The average error number per reply as a function

of the time delay. Small circles denote the conventional receiver/processor, small crosses the filtered version of SIR-S,
small squares the MDA, no sign the PA; the plain curves refer to the leading reply, and the dash-dotted to the trailing
reply.
In Figure 9 we present the average error number per reply as a function of the time delay, which varies between

and  s. We note that the conventional system not only can
decode only one reply, but also has the worst average number of error per reply. As foreseen, the PA algorithm cannot
cope with no time delay, but we note similar performance
between the MDA and the PA above  s, so it appears that
it is more interesting to use the PA from  s. In [12], the
advantage of the PA over the MDA was shown only on simulated data, and it is known [2] that above 
s the MDA
is not reliable. The average LCB number per reply is not
presented here as it has the same shape as Figure 9 and does
not bring additional information.
Next, we study the influence of the SNR on the algo
 dB, and the time derithms; the SNR ranges in 
lay is fixed to s. The number of independent couples
ranges between   for a SNR of dB, and
for
 dB.

Average error number per reply

10

10

10

10

15

20

25

SNR (dB)

Fig. 11. The average error number per reply as a function of the SNR. Small circles denote the conventional receiver/processor, small crosses the filtered version of SIR-S,
small squares the MDA, no sign the PA; the plain curves refer to the leading reply, and the dash-dotted to the trailing
reply.
In Figure 11, we show the average error number per reply as a function of the SNR. Note that both the PA and the
MDA have very good behavior as compared to competitors,
and follow a linear shape for low SNR. It is not yet clear to
us why the curves have constant performance for high SNR,
but is under investigation. Note that over a SNR of
dB,
the average error is equal to zero. The average LCB num-

ber per reply is not presented as it has the same shape than
Figure 11 and does not bring additional information.

[5] R.M. Trim, Mode S: an introduction and overview,

Electronics & Communication Engineering Journal,
vol. 2, pp. 5359, Apr. 1990.

4.3. Computational cost

[6] Gaspare Galati, P. Magar`o, M. Gasbarra, and

M. Leonardi, New signal processing techniques in
SSR-Mode S replies multilateration for A-SMGCS,
in Proceeding of IRS04, Warsaw, Poland, 19-21 May
2004.

All algorithms consists in a phase of separation followed

by a decoder. The separation part for MDA takes

 s,
for the PA algorithm it takes

 s, and the JADE algorithm uses

 s. We remind that JADE was updated by
a large community of researchers, while the PA algorithm
contains the signal detector in its code (
 of the computing time), which should also be taken into account in a
real JADE implementation. The MDA has never been optimized, and should also contain the signal detector. To the
separation cost, it should be added two times the cost of the
decoder (for both replies). In a practical implementation,
downstream the PA algorithm two standard decoding processors can be set in parallel.

5. CONCLUSION AND PERSPECTIVES

In this paper, we have presented a practical solution to the
cumbersome problem of detecting and decoding two partially overlapping Mode S replies. This proposed solution
works satisfactorily in most of the cases with a limited cost
in computation (and therefore in hardware) with respect to
competing solutions; it can be extended to more (e.g. three,
or more) overlapping signals.
In the future, we will concentrate on considering a more
complete system that should be able to take care of all the
possible cases, for the sake of increasing the safety of air
and airport traffic.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors wish to thank Selex-Sistemi Integrati and Finmeccanica Group for supporting research activities by Tor
Vergata University in the area of Mode S. The contribution by Delft Technical University (IRCTR and CAS) to the
acquisition of real SSR signals is also gratefully acknowledged.

[7] Gaspare Galati, Simone Bartolini, and Luca Men`e,

Analysis of SSR signals by super resolution algorithms, in Proceeding of IEEE symposium ISSPIT-04,
Roma, Italy, Dec. 2004.
[8] Gaspare Galati and Simone Bartolini, Trasponditore
del Radar Secondario di Sorveglianza (SSR) Agile in
Frequenza, 14 October 2004, Patent RM 2004 A
000503.
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zero/constant modulus signals,
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to handle SSR replies, in Conference Radar, Brest,
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surveillance radar replies, Tesi di laurea, Universit`a
di Roma Tor Vergata, Roma, Italy, 2003.
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7. REFERENCES

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