ADS-B Signal Detection via Time-Frequency Analysis for Radio Astronomy Applications

This paper proposes a time-frequency (TF) domain technique for detecting the presence of automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) interference signals in radio astronomy applications. The proposed technique uses a priori knowledge about the ADS-B signal’s frequency information and compares it with the received signal’s spectrogram time slices via the cosine similarity function. In the presence of ADS-B signals, the similarity levels are higher, whereas in their absence the levels are lower. Hence, the proposed approach exploits this to detect the presence of such signals. Simulation results using signals from the Parkes radio telescope show the efficacy of the proposed method in detecting the presence of ADS-B signals when compared with other classic detectors.