Sensor arrays for improved instrumental landing systems

The importance of air transportation in everyday's life has increased dramatically, in the last few years. Among the consequences of the growing demand for air-related services, the need of assuring an exact and timely flight arrival has become a crucial factor, both for safety and economical reasons. At the same time, broadcasting antennas, radio links and cellular telephone base stations demand continuously increasing spaces around airports, representing a source of disturbing interference for radio-navigation systems. An improved instrumental landing system (ILS) receiver based on array processing concepts is proposed for safer automatic landing procedures. The new approach is based on direction of arrival (DOA) estimation performed by the UN-MUSIC algorithm. The superior performance of the proposed system with respect to currently employed techniques in the presence of unwanted interferences has been tested in extensive computer simulations