Evaluation of Beamforming Strategies for Enhanced Space‐Based Massive ADS‐B Signal Detection

This work proposes and evaluates beamforming techniques to enhance future LEO‐based ADS‐B reception targeting global coverage, including dense continental regions. An accurate interference model enables detailed characterization of interference conditions, revealing the detrimental impact of antenna sidelobe levels, particularly for aircraft operating in low‐SNR regions. Combining amplitude tapering to reduce sidelobe effects with beam diversity achieved through oversampling at coverage edges yields consistent performance gains, which can be further enhanced by employing a maximum a posteriori decoder capable of resolving a single strong collision. Numerical simulations show that the achieved performance is scenario dependent. Across the considered scenarios, the proposed approach yields improvements of up to 49 % in the proportion of aircraft satisfying a given position update interval probability, along with an effective coverage extension of up to , compared with a standard uniform beam grid with −3 dB beam crossovers combined with basic decoder treating interference as noise, which already outperforms the conventional ADS‐B receiver in the presence of ADS‐B and Mode‐S collisions.