A system and method are disclosed to track aircraft or other vehicles
using techniques including multilateration and elliptical surveillance.
Unlike conventional approaches that use time difference of arrival for
multilateration at a fixed set of reception points, this technique allows
targets to be tracked from a number of dynamic or moving reception
points. This allows for triangulation/multilateration and elliptical
surveillance of targets from combinations of fixed, fixed and moving or
only moving ground-based receivers, sea-based receivers, airborne
receivers and space-based receivers. Additionally this technique allows
for ADS-B validation through data derived from only two receivers to
assess the validity and integrity of the aircraft self-reported position
by comparing the time of arrival of the emitted message at the second
receiver to the predicted time of message arrival at the second receiver
based on the self-reported position of the aircraft and the time of
arrival at the first receiver. The benefits of using less than three
receivers for validation include greater validation coverage areas using
a smaller set of ground stations at a lower infrastructure cost.