Performance Comparison of Cooperative and Non-Cooperative Surveillance for UAS Detect-and-Avoid in Mixed Airspace

Abstract

Uncrewed aircraft systems operating in mixed airspace must maintain sufficient situational awareness to support detect-and-avoid functions without degrading the safety and efficiency of existing crewed aviation. Cooperative surveillance, based on transponder and broadcast technologies, and non-cooperative surveillance, based on direct observation of emitted or reflected energy, provide distinct and partially overlapping capabilities for tracking relevant traffic. As integration of diverse UAS classes proceeds, including vehicles with heterogeneous equipage and performance characteristics, it becomes necessary to characterize and compare the performance of cooperative and non-cooperative surveillance architectures under realistic traffic, geometry, and interference conditions. This paper develops an analytical and modeling framework to interpret detect-and-avoid relevant indicators, including detection probability, track continuity, update latency, geometric coverage, and sensitivity to interference, for both cooperative and non-cooperative sensing modalities and their combinations. The discussion distinguishes between low-level sensing properties and high-level detect-and-avoid performance while remaining agnostic to specific regulatory implementations. By applying the framework to representative mixed airspace scenarios, including both nominal and degraded modes, the study examines how different architectures influence the availability and reliability of trajectories and encounter states used by detect-and-avoid algorithms. The results highlight parameter regimes in which each class of surveillance is comparatively more robust, as well as regimes in which fusion provides incremental benefit. The analysis is framed to support systematic reasoning about architectural trade-offs rather than to prescribe a single solution.