Scalable Implementation of Aircraft/Drone Multilateration and Tracking

Aircraft and drones continuously transmit radio-frequency signals that can be exploited to reconstruct their flight trajectories using multilateration. Multilateration relies on measuring the time difference of arrival (TDOA) of these signals at multiple geographically distributed ground receivers to estimate an aircraft’s position over time.

The objective of this project is to design and implement a scalable aircraft multilateration and tracking system capable of handling data from thousands of ground stations and processing more than one million incoming radio messages per second. The system will be evaluated using real-world data from the OpenSky Network (https://opensky-network.org) and applied to the detection of abnormal aircraft behavior and drone intrusions.