Development of an Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast Modem Using Dataflow Specifications

Air traffic control nowadays mainly relies on radar based surveillance system and with the growth of air traffic, the problems of air transportation system is approaching its limit. The increase in the task of scheduling flights results in higher overall operation cost and pose higher rate of flight safety hazards. Thus, an upgrade from conventional air traffic management systems to the Next Generation Air Transportation (NextGen) System is required. The Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) modem is the key component of NextGen, which uses Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to provide better accuracy of aircraft position. ADS-B continuously broadcasts information on altitude, position, identity, velocity, and other aircraft information to generate best picture for air traffic management. In this paper, the ADS-B modulator and demodulator have been developed using high-level RVC-CAL dataflow actor language, and automatically synthesized to C and Verilog/ VHDL codes for hardware and software implementations. Results show that the performance of the proposed designs at high-level exceeds the minimum throughput requirement specified in the ADS-B standard by a factor of more than three.