ASTERIX (short for All Purpose Structured Eurocontrol Surveillance Information Exchange) is a standard for the exchange of air traffic services (ATS) information. It is developed and maintained by the European ATS organization Eurocontrol. ASTERIX not only stands for All-Purpose Structured Eurocontrol Surveillance Information Exchange but also represents a state-of-the-art surveillance data format which is nearly being adopted by the world users community as the universal standard in this domain today.
ASTERIX is an extensible standard with a number of different categories, each of which deals with one particular kind of information. These include target reports from surveillance sensors such as radars as well as processed information such as aircraft tracks and various system status messages.
Each system/sensor using the ASTERIX data format is assigned a unique identifier composed of two 8 bit values, the System Area Code (SAC) and the System Identification Code (SIC). The ANSP selects the SIC, but the SAC is assigned globally to system operators by Eurocontrol (see external link).