Secure Command and Control Link with Interference Mitigation

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) control and non-payload physical (CNCP) layer is envisioned to be infrastructure-free and, thus, susceptible to multi-user interference and a wide variety of jammers. These jammers can launch arbitrary signals or noise to interfere with single or multiple communication channels across a wide spectrum of frequencies. As a result, several undesirable scenarios can occur including total loss of link, increased power consumption, packet delays or bit errors. Therefore, interference cancellation and mitigation techniques are required to establish secure communication between unmanned aircraft and control station. The main objective of this research is to evaluate vulnerabilities of UAS communication links as well as develop and implement/test multi-user interference cancellation and jamming mitigation methods. The goal of this project is to implement transceivers for UAS communications, evaluate various interference/jamming scenarios gain, and develop robust architectures to suppress different types of jammers in a wide variety of settings. This will be achieved by combining adaptive channel coding and spread spectrum techniques to realize large coding gain and jamming mitigation. This project will also introduce novel mitigation techniques based on multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) as well as exploiting the strong level of service (LOS) component. This research will conduct analysis and testing to assess and mitigate multi-user interference for all types of jamming in the evaluated radio frequency (RF) waveforms. Analyses and tests will be conducted for UAS C2 data link physical security protection addressing frequency bands of interests to SC-228 Phase 1 and Phase 2 Minimum Operational Performance Standards (MOPS) for Unmanned Aircraft Systems. In addition, new security schemes will be proposed.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • Contract to a Performing Organization has not yet been awarded.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Sponsor Organizations:

  Federal Aviation Administration

  800 Independence Avenue, SW
  Washington, DC  United States  20591
• Start Date: 20160808
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 0

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Aircraft operations; Drones; Interference; Level of service; Radio frequency; Transceivers; Wireless communication systems
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Data and Information Technology; Operations and Traffic Management;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01610337
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Alliance for System Safety of UAS through Research Excellence (ASSURE)
• Files: RIP, USDOT
• Created Date: Sep 7 2016 5:01PM