A Proposed Communication, Navigation & Surveillance System Architecture to Support Urban Air Traffic Management

The long outstanding human inspiration to be able to traverse intra-city destinations aerially, avoiding traffic congestions is on the brink of materialization. Flight trials of Air Taxis pave the way for Urban Air Mobility (UAM). However, the greater challenge resides in formulating the Urban Air Traffic Management (UATM) structure and procedures to enable multiple aircraft to safely navigate their way in urban skies. The key technologies enabling UATM are Communications, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) systems. This paper presents a proposed configuration for CNS System to support UATM. Aircraft for UAM are supposed to operate within the aerial bounds of the cities away from conventional air traffic. Thus air traffic would be much denser and the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system required to control air mobility must provide integrity, robustness, security and high geo-spatial accuracy. Additionally, there is also a need for fast and accurate communication between traffic controller and the air vehicle. Communication requirements for UAM include Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), Vertiport to vertiport and Vertiport to Vehicle communication. Navigation requires Self-positioning and Situational-awareness. Surveillance needs to be able to perform Ground stations detecting and tracking aircraft, position and Identification updates. The paper presents the concept of operation, architecture of CNS systems fulfilling these requirements. The region of flight operations is the capital city of Islamabad and adjoining regions. The viability of the proposed structure is verified through simulations carried out in GNU Octave software.