Findings from Interference Monitoring at a European Airport

Abstract

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) have become increasingly important in many different fields of application, including the aeronautical domain. With the growing dependency on GNSS for various safety-critical applications, also the threat of intentional signal disturbances grows and the number of reported incidents of jamming is increasing. Even spoofing attacks, which were long thought of being only a theoretical threat requiring high effort and knowledge, can nowadays be conducted using relatively cheap software-defined radios (SDRs) and open-source software. This paper presents an introduction to GNSS interference and an algorithm for interference monitoring based on a combination of several detectors. This algorithm is embedded into the regulatory framework for aviation receivers and aims to close the gap between GNSS integrity measures in the current regulations and real-world interference threats. Beside the description of the developed algorithm, the paper also focuses on a dedicated monitoring campaign at the airport Brno in Czech Republic. The paper concludes with a summary of the main findings of the monitoring campaign and an outlook is given on future developments. Reliable detection is considered vital since it is the first step of interference mitigation and anti-jamming.