PAGE CONTENTS
Objectives
The AISTB project aims at developing an End-to-End Testbed able to evaluate the different AIS systems performances both at system and subsystem level, in a laboratory environment.
Two main subsystems were developed: the AIS Receiver Testbench, capable of interfacing with different AIS receivers (prototype, engineering model, EQM) from different manufacturers to assess their functionality and performance; and the System Emulator, a software capable of modeling any AIS constellation with configurable key system parameters including vessels traffic distribution, constellation, access protocol as well as AIS antenna and receiver characteristics.
The AIS Receiver Test Bench also includes a prototyping hardware platform to be used to implement the AIS receiver algorithms specified by ESA for benchmarking purposes.
As a secondary objective, advanced beamforming techniques to enhance the satellite AIS detection performance were studied and evaluated in detail, possibly leading to a reduced constellation and thus a lower total space segment cost.
Challenges
The aim of this activity is to develop an end-to-end system validation platform for space based AIS systems and sub-systems.
The AIS Testbed is meant to facilitate the evaluation of different AIS performance measures at system and subsystem level in a laboratory environment.
The AIS Testbed will be used in the comparative performance assessment activity for evaluating the performances of existing or planned systems and of the underlying technologies.
The target lifetime of the AIS Testbed is at least 5 years.
Plan
The duration of the overall project is 11 months. A 6-months Remote Support period is foreseen after Testbed delivery to ESTEC Telecom Laboratory.
The activity is structured in the following tasks:
- Task 1: Testbed Definition
- Task 2: AIS Receiver Test Bench Detailed Design and Implementation
- Task 3: System Emulator Development
- Task 4: Beam Forming Techniques Investigation for Space Based AIS
- Task 5: Testbed Integration
- Task 6: End-to-end Validation Campaign
- Task 7: Reporting and Testbed Delivery
The project completion, with AIS Testbed delivered, installed and tested at ESTEC Telecom Laboratory, is scheduled for Q1 2013.
Current Status
The project completed all the activities at the end of September 2014.
The development and testing of the AIS ESA software and ESA receiver model and of the hardware model has been finalized.
The AIS testbench integration and validation is done.
Functional and performance tests of the System Emulator has been performed.
