Demo: I Am Not Afraid of the GPS Jammer: Exploiting Cellular Signals for Accurate Ground Vehicle Navigation in a GPS-Denied Environment

T HIS demo presents unprecedented attack-defense results of a ground vehicle navigating to a meter-level accuracy in defense mechanism exploited signals from eight cellular long-term evolution (LTE) towers, whose positions were mapped prior to the experiment, from the U.S. cellular providers T-Mobile and Verizon, one of which was more than 52 km away from the ground vehicle. These signals were processed by the author’s software-defined radio (SDR) to produce pseudorange measurements, which were fused through an extended Kalman filter to estimate the vehicle’s trajectory. The defense mechanism achieved a position RMSE of 2.6 m exclusively with cellular LTE signals and no other sensors. The results are summarized in Fig. 2. Note that to obtain the vehicle’s ground truth trajectory, a vehicle-mounted GNSS-IMU system was used, which utilized signals from the non-jammed GNSS constellations (Galileo and GLONASS). It is worth noting that the unprecedented 2.6 position RMSE achieved in this demo are an order of magnitude smaller than previously published results in the same environment, which achieved a position RMSE of 29.4 m. Further details can be found in the video.