M3 SYSTEMS : How To Test Jamming ?

Why should we care about Jamming?

Due to an ever-increasing reliance on GNSS in position, navigation, and timing (PNT) applications, ensuring its stability and reliability has become crucial. However, with wireless transmissions becoming more common than ever, and hardware capable of GPS jamming becoming more accessible and affordable, GNSS signals -due to their weak power levels- can be easily disrupted by unintentional or intentional jamming attacks.

With the emergence of NAVWAR, GNSS jamming is regarded as a major threat which jeopardizes the public order and the safety of civil & military transportation, such as planes, ships, and special convoys. It also causes significant harm in safety-critical applications such as civil aviation or self-driving smart vehicles.

This problematic calls for the need to assess the impact of interferences and jamming attacks on GNSS receivers, before they are integrated to larger systems.

How to assess PNT integrity against Jamming?

In-field tests are one method for determining the impact of interference signals on GNSS receivers. Although this method allows you to test your receiver in realistic test environments, it has several shortcomings:

• The low repeatability of the environmental factors which cause unintentional jamming
• The need to acquire solutions capable of GNSS jamming to assess reliability under jamming attacks
• The diverse types of interferences (CW, NB, PCW, WB, PWB, MS, etc.) which can lead to PNT miscalculations and the incapacity to generate all of them in real life conditions
• The low or difficult control over the testing conditions and interferer characteristics (waveform, position, dynamics, etc)
• The need to test under the present and detected satellites and no other regional constellations or satellite configurations
• The cost related to resources and equipment transportation to field test locations [...]