Ground Positioning System (GPS) Spoofing Avoidance Utilizing Frequency Selective Surface (FSS) Method

Abstract

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has gained increasing interests from the industry and academia as it has a variety of emerging applications, such as aerial sensors, flying base stations and mobile relays. UAVs operate in two modes which are remotely controlled and autonomous mode. In a remotely controlled mode, the vehicle must be flying within the operator's radio range to remain in control. In a fully autonomous flying mode, the UAV requires a reliable Global Positioning System (GPS) signal reception for the vehicle to reach its waypoints accurately. However, fully autonomous flying with relatively low GPS signal strength (civil GPS signal) exposes the UAV to the risk of being spoofed, where its navigation is taken over through signal manipulations. Spoofing is an act of taking over the flight of an autonomous UAV by injecting a fake or false GPS positioning signal from an external transmitting device. The main goal of spoofing is to divert the autonomous UAV from its original flying coordinates, thus taking control of the UAV from its operator. Therefore, the goal of this work is to explore a technique to prevent spoofing which is called Frequency Selective Surface (FSS) technique. The design and fabrication of several FSS filters to reduce the spoofing potentialities are discussed in this paper. A preliminary work for the FSS technique is performed through finite element analysis which suggests two different factors to be considered for the filter fabrication; the bandwidth requirement and the frequency selectivity. © 2020, Institute of Advanced Scientific Research, Inc.. All rights reserved.