Software-Defined Radio GNSS Instrumentation for Spoofing Mitigation: A Review and a Case Study
This work addresses the problem of GNSS spoofing for navigation systems, but it is incremental as it focuses on reviewing and analyzing existing SDR approaches.
The paper reviews software-defined radio (SDR) implementations for GNSS receivers to address spoofing vulnerabilities, highlighting the challenge of high computational demands in spoofing mitigation modes through a case study budget analysis.
Recently, several global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) emerged following the transformative technology impact of the first GNSS: US Global Positioning System (GPS). The power level of GNSS signals as measured at the earths surface is below the noise floor and is consequently vulnerable against interference. Spoofers are smart GNSS-like interferers, which mislead the receivers into generating false position and time information. While many spoofing mitigation techniques exist, spoofers are continually evolving, producing a cycle of new spoofing attacks and counter-measures against them. Thus, upgradability of receivers becomes an important advantage for maintaining their immunity against spoofing. Software-defined radio (SDR) implementations of a GPS receiver address such flexibility but are challenged by demanding computational requirements of both GNSS signal processing and spoofing mitigation. Therefore, this paper reviews reported SDRs in the context of instrumentation capabilities for both conventional and spoofing mitigation modes. This separation is necessitated by significantly increased computational loads when in spoofing domain. This is demonstrated by a case study budget analysis.