Beam scanning for reception performance improvement of satellite-based AIS

Satellite based automatic identification system (AIS) is currently being investigated as a remote traffic monitoring system for global maritime surveillance. Because of it being a TDMA based communication system, large number of ships using same communication channel comes under the big field of view (FOV) of the satellite leading towards collisions of the transmissions. This causes the reception performance to drop down drastically. Performance improvement of satellite based AIS receiver is therefore an urgent need to providing more efficient surveillance to a large number of ships. A novel dual channel dual antenna based beam scanning mechanism, the first of its kind is developed to improve the reception capacity of satellite based AIS. 37% more number of ships is received using beam scanning compared with large single beam antenna. The improvement in the number of correct burst reception is also obtained as a part of the major claim of this scheme.