dump1090-hptoa

This is a fork of Mutability's version of dump1090 that adds a novel method to compute high-precision Time-of-Arrival (ToA) timestamps of the Mode S / ADS-B packets. The actual precision is in the order of a few nanoseconds, depending on the packet strength. Original README

This version is licensed under the GPL (v2 or later). See the file COPYING for details.

This new version is based on the work named 'Nanosecond-precision Time-of-Arrival Estimation for Aircraft Signals with low-cost SDR Receivers' published in ACM/IEEE IPSN 2018 conference and made by Roberto Calvo-Palomino, Fabio Ricciato, Blaz Repas, Domenico Giustiniano, Vincent Lenders.

Precise Time-of-Arrival (TOA) estimations of aircraft and drone signals are important for a wide set of applications including aircraft/drone tracking, air traffic data verification, or self-localization. Our focus in this work is on TOA estimation methods that can run on low-cost software-defined radio (SDR) receivers, as widely deployed in Mode S / ADS-B crowdsourced sensor networks such as the OpenSky Network. We evaluate experimentally classical TOA estimation methods which are based on a cross-correlation with a reconstructed message template and find that these methods are not optimal for such signals. We propose two alternative methods that provide superior results for real-world Mode S / ADS-B signals captured with low-cost SDR receivers. The best method achieves a standard deviation error of 1.5 ns.

Features

• High Precision Time-of-Arrival (ToA) timestamps for Mode-S packets.
• Upsampling performs in the GPU (root is needed).
• A free-lock system queue (based on moodycamel) to parallelize message processing.
• Tested in extensively RaspberryPi-3 model B.
• Compilation process integrated with cmake.

Building the project

• Clone the repository

  $ git clone https://github.com/openskynetwork/dump1090-hptoa

• Compile the project

  $ cd dump1090-hptoa/
  $ mkdir build && cmake ../
  $ make

How to run

This new version adds a new parameter to enable the high precision timestamp method.

--enable-hptoa <method>  Enable High Precision TimeStamping: PeakPulse (default), CorrPulse or None

• PeakPulse: The default method with lower computation cost (no correlations are performed, only upsampling). The maximum message rate supported on RaspberryPi-3 model B on RPi 3 is estimated to be c.ca 2000 msg/sec. We strongly recommend to use this method.

• CorrPulse: Alternative method, slightly more precise than the previous one, but heavier on computation resources (CPU, memory). The maximum message rate supported on RaspberryPi-3 model B on RPi 3 is estimated around 700 msg/sec. This option is provided to support future testing and research, we do not recommend to use it for production deployments.

• None: No high-precision timestamp computed, fallback to the legacy timestamp of the mutability version.

The detailed description of both methods can be found on the paper: 'Nanosecond-precision Time-of-Arrival Estimation for Aircraft Signals with low-cost SDR Receivers'

Run as root

Since the high precision timestamp estimation requires FFT/IFFT computation in the GPU, it is needed to run dump1090 process as root. This applies to both PeakPulse and CorrPulse method.

sudo dump1090 --enable-hptoa PeakPulse --interactive