RADIAL2017

Starting point / motivation

It is commonly agreed that Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) will gain importance in future and the dependency of safety critical infrastructure or of future key technologies on GNSS will further increase. However, GNSS is known to be vulnerable especially by jamming or spoofing. Those threats have been investigated intensively during the past focusing of detection and mitigation. Localization of interfering signal sources (especially of GNSS spoofers) has received less research attention so far.

Contents and goals

Regulatory authorities ensure proper use of the electromagnetic frequency spectrum. The authorities maintain a sophisticated infrastructure to ensure mainly proper functioning of the various communication services within a state. This infrastructure has only limited ability to be used to monitor navigation services like GNSS and is unable to localize those interfering sources. This is because the signal structure of a communication signal differs significantly from navigation signals and communications signals use signal powers far above the ones used for navigation signals. The inability of regulatory authorities to protect the GNSS frequency spectrum has been seen in several incidents during the past years.

Methods

The proposed project aims at developing a real-time GNSS monitoring station by using a GNSS software receiver together with a rotating dual purpose antenna. Considering typical jamming and spoofing scenarios yields the necessity to develop improved spoofer localization algorithms to cope with non-cooperative (low cost) spoofers. Furthermore, a new mechanical design shall be developed for the rotating antenna to include a directional antenna element to localize jamming signals.

The ability of the developed demonstrator system to detect and localize interfering sources shall be tested within a dedicated measurement campaign. Considering the complexity of the task due to the low signal power and the inevitable signal reflections, large efforts will be spent to characterize the system performance in terms of angular accuracy and horizontal localization performance. We also plan test to localize more than one interfering source.

Expected results

IGASPIN GmbH intends to perform the tests on a “Truppenübungsplatz” of the Federal Army of Austria. In case this is not possible, test areas of IFEN GmbH in Germany can be used. In particular, the German Galileo Test Bed (GATE) operated by IFEN offers the possibility to conduct a number of different tests under various realistic conditions.

Coordinator

IGASPIN GmbH

Project partner

• Blickwinkel Grafikdesign, Inh. Schimpl Franz-Josef
• Graz University of Technology, Institute of Geodesy, Working Group Navigation

IGASPIN GmbH
Rüdiger Hein
Reininghausstr. 13a
A-8020 Graz