Aircraft navigation and spacecraft coordination via wireless local positioning systems

This paper introduces a novel wireless local positioning system (WLPS)(1) and highlights its applications for aircraft relative positioning and spacecraft constellation navigation. WLPS allows each node (aircraft) to independently localize and track other aircrafts in its coverage area. WLPS systems use a merger of Direct-Sequence Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) and Beam forming to improve the detection performance. The paper briefly introduces the WLPS and studies its detection performance for space applications. In addition, it discusses how the proposed WLPS can be integrated with other available sensors in aircraft to ensure coordination of multiple aircraft. The proposed system has applications in relative aircraft positioning and in multi-spacecraft collaborative missions. In addition, the proposed architecture supports the process of distributed communication-navigation surveillance (CNS-ATM).