Protecting GNSS Receivers From Jamming and Interference

TLDR

Critical sectors increasingly rely on GNSS for positioning, navigation, and timing, but low‑cost jamming devices pose a serious threat, with attacks ranging from intentional jamming to accidental interference. This paper reviews approaches to mitigate GNSS disruption from intentional and unintentional jamming. The review covers four mitigation strategies: inertial system augmentation, spatial and time‑frequency filtering, and vector tracking of GNSS signals.

Abstract

Critical government and industry sectors (such as law enforcement, transportation, communication, and finance) are growing increasingly dependent on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for positioning, navigation, and timing. At the same time, the availability of low-cost GNSS jamming devices are presenting a serious threat to GNSS and increasing the likelihood of outages to infrastructures relying on GNSS. The attacks range from malicious parties intentionally jamming GNSS signals within a targeted geographical region to uninformed users causing accidental interference. This paper is an overview of different approaches adopted to date to mitigate GNSS disruption caused by intentional and unintentional jamming. The first approach outlined in this paper is the use of inertial systems to aid GNSS. The second and third approaches are the filtering of jamming/interference in the spatial and time-frequency domains, respectively. The fourth approach is vector tracking of GNSS signals in the receiver.