Impact of Meaconers on Aircraft GNSS Receivers During Approaches

Abstract

This paper develops a classification to quantify the impact of a meaconer on an aircraft GNSS receiver, from the tracking loops up to the position estimation, during an SBAS-guided LPV-200 approach. Depending on the scenario, the impact of the meaconer on the estimated position can be catalogued for each GNSS signal at a given epoch into one of the four following situations -nominal, jamming, multipath or spoofing. In the nominal situation, the meaconer has no appreciable impact on the aircraft position. In the jamming situation, the meaconer induces higher noise levels resulting in greater errors in the position estimation than in the nominal situation. In the multipath situation, the meaconer effect on the position is similar to a GNSS multipath error. In the spoofing situation, the meaconer adds a deterministic bias on a subset of PRNs that can lead to significantly erroneous position estimations. Extensive simulations demonstrate that a meaconer with a high power and close to the aircraft trajectory can degrade the GNSS receiver performance and provoke faulty estimations of the aircraft position, which are not compliant with the civil aviation standards.