Patent attributes
A method and system are provided for measuring and monitoring performance metrics of a non-ADS-B tracking system and generating performance metrics for the non-ADS-B tracking system in terms of ADS-B equivalent performance metrics. An aircraft transmits various transponder-based or other signals which are received at multiple ground stations, some of which may be ADS-B stations or both ADS-B and multilateration stations. ADS-B signals may contain performance metrics which are passed on from ADS-B station to an ADS-B processor, which outputs aircraft-derived metrics. ADS-B signals and all other transponder signals are also received at all ground stations, time-stamped, and sent to a multilateration processor, which generates multilateration metrics. Therefore two streams of information are passed onto ATC system processor containing the ADS-B aircraft-derived metrics and multilateration-derived metrics. The ATC system processor may then be configured to pass along both sets of messages to the ATC system, or to select a combination or fusion of the best metrics and tracking information for an aircraft.
