Hybrid N-Inception-LSTM-Based Aircraft Coordinate Prediction Method for Secure Air Traffic

With the rapid growth of the number of flights, the traditional radar system has been unable to meet the needs of flight supervision. At the same time, it also puts forward higher requirements for air traffic management (ATM). Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is a promising technology in the next generation of air traffic control (ATC). However, the openness of ADS-B system brings the opportunities for terrorists to tamper with data. In this paper, we propose a novel aircraft coordinate prediction hybrid model based on deep learning. The proposed model combines inception modules and long short-term memory (LSTM) modules. Inception modules are used to extract the spatial features of dataset, and LSTM modules are used to extract the temporal features of dataset. In addition, we use the ADS-B signal strength instead of its specific information to obtain aircraft coordinates. Signal strength is not easily tampered with, but it carries limited information. Therefore, this scheme sacrifices a certain precision for reliability. Inception modules and LSTM modules are combined in different ways to perform experiments on the real-world ADS-B datasets from OpenSky network. The experimental results show that the proposed 2-Inception-LSTM is the local optimal model. The prediction error is within 10 km. It can be suitable for situations where the positioning accuracy of aircraft coordinates is not pursued, but the positioning reliability must be guaranteed.