Here is the accuracy and estimation game played by 208 guests at GPS World’s Leadership Dinner in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday evening, September 20. Take a gander at the rules that follow, and then try your skill at the nine questions.
To play fair, do not use Google or any other research, reference, or resource. Dinner guests were honor-bound not to employ their smartphones — just their smarts. You are, too.
The first six questions had known answers (at least to the gamesmasters) at the time of the dinner. The final three peered into the future, as of that evening. Two of them have since been determined. Once the Galileo question is settled, the What Do You Know Grand Winners — 10 individuals who sat and gamed together among the 21 competing tables — will be announced, and suitable tchotchkes distributed.
A special division for online contestants has been established; send your answers to [email protected]. Any entries that are too suspiciously close to the true answers will be disqualified for use of unauthorized resources.
The accounting and awarding — and all the answers — will appear on the Wide Awake Blog in the very near future. Do not touch that dial.
Game Rules
1. What Do You Know? What’s Your CEP? consists of nine quantitative questions. Answer each question as best you can — without the aid of outside sources! Then give your error range: an upper bound and a lower bound.
Answers will be graded on how close they are to the true answer, the size of the error range given, and whether that error range encompasses the true answer. The smaller your error range, the higher your potential score — but if the true answer falls outside your error range, you score zero for that question.
2. The second and third rules pertained to “play by tables” at the dinner, and are irrelevant and thus omitted here.
4. A final trifecta of three questions asks you to predict events in the future. After turning in your answers to these questions, game play concludes for the evening. A final Grand Prize to the winning table will be awarded after the last event.
A more detailed mathematical explanation of the scoring process is available at the scorer’s table, should you wish to see it.
And now, are you ready to play . . . .
What Do You Know??!!??!! What’s Your CEP??!!??
1. Estimate the distance in kilometers from Shanghai, China, to Nashville, Tennessee, along a Great Circle global route, and from that derive the number of Delta II booster rockets (used to launch GPS satellites) laid end-to-end that would cover that distance.
Upper bound ______________
Absolute answer _________
Lower bound ______________
2. Give the total area, in either square inches or square centimeters (specify which you are giving) of a rather substantial hat worn by Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, to a friend’s wedding in July of this year.
Kate Middleton
That hat!
Upper bound ______________
Absolute answer __________
Lower bound ______________
3. Peg the number of total orbiting and operating GNSS satellites, including SBAS, as of September 20, 2012.
Upper bound ______________
Absolute answer _____________
Lower bound ______________
4. Jack Daniel’s, a sour mash whiskey made in Lynchburg, Tennessee and the best-selling whiskey in the world, is known for its square bottles and black label. How many shots of whiskey does a white-oak barrel of Jack Daniel’s contain?
Jack Daniel’s barrel in the Hermitage Hotel, Nashville
Upper bound ______________
Absolute answer _____________
Lower bound ______________
5. How many of Richard Langley’s “Innovation” columns have appeared in GPS World magazine?
Upper bound ______________
Absolute answer _____________
Lower bound ______________
6. In his memoirs, Tony Blair mentions that, when he first met Queen Elizabeth II as Prime Minister of the UK, the Queen put him in his place by telling him, “You are my tenth prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born.”
In a similar vein, how many individuals have served as Prime Minister (official, not acting or deputy) of Japan from the beginning of the Shōwa era under Emperor Hirohito in 1926 until today? (Note: This is the count of individual persons. A single person serving as Prime Minister several times, such as the postwar Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, counts only once.)
Upper bound ______________
Absolute answer _____________
Lower bound ______________
Final Trifecta
7. Predict the number of days that will elapse between the day of the combined launch of the Galileo IOV-3 and IOV-4 satellites and the day when the first satellite of that pair is declared operational. Dates are defined based on UTC. For example, if the launch should take place on the currently scheduled date of October 10, then October 11 would be 1 day, October 31 would be 21 days, and so on. If the launch occurs on a different date, we start counting from there.
Upper bound ______________
Absolute answer _____________
Lower bound ______________
8. Predict the number of U.S. states, out of 50, that go blue in the Presidential election on November 6, 2012 — that is, their electoral votes go to President Obama’s Democratic Party ticket.
Upper bound ______________
Absolute answer _____________
Lower bound ______________
9. Predict the total number of combined points scored in all three NFL football games to be played on Thanksgiving, November 22: Houston Texans vs. Detroit Lions, Dallas Cowboys vs. Washington Redskins, New England Patriots vs. New York Jets.
Threat Development Parallels Information/Communication Technology
Headshot: Oscar Pozzobon
By Oscar Pozzobon
The GNSS interference session this year at the ION-GNSS conference in Nashville was one of the most crowded, confirming the need of all sectors of the community to understand the threats in GNSS and how they can be mitigated. In that context I received one of the most challenging questions of my career: “Can we predict the future of GNSS security?” What is the status of civil and commercial GNSS security today? Which are the threats and risks and how they are mitigated? Where are we going and what shall we expect from the future?
I decided to tackle this topic carefully, using as a basis and inspiration the history of information and communication technology (ICT) security: from the first threats and attacks of the 1980s to a glance at what technology offers today.
Secondly, to obtain different perspectives — and shift the blame to someone else if one day these predictions should prove to be wrong — I solicited the opinions of three other experts and colleagues in the domain of GNSS and security: Logan Scott, Todd Humphreys, and David Last.
Snapshots from History
The Internet was officially born in 1969 when the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) crated the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). A short 11 years later, the 414 Gang, a computer-hacking organization (the term hacking was coined at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as early as the 1960s) performed one of the first attacks and frauds upon computer systems. In 1983 the first computer virus was discovered. In 1988 the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was created to report and disseminate information on the threats, and AT&T Bell Labs created the first concept of firewalls. Some readers may recall the 1983 movie War Games, which found Hollywood hard at work on cyber-attacks, denial, and deception to computer systems at a time when we had only six GPS satellites in orbit. One year later, Steven M. Bellovin published a paper on the possibility of performing a transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) Spoofing attack.
Six years after that paper, in 1995, the Computer Incident Advisory Committee (CIAC) reported the first TCP/IP spoofing attack to a system. In another four years, the first denial of service (DoS) attack to computer networks was reported by the CERT. A DoS attack consists of several computer systems sending unsolicited requests to the target, causing a saturation of network and computer resources. In terms of objectives, it could be compared to what jamming causes in GNSS systems.
Between 1984 and 1986, Dorothy Denning and Peter Neumann researched and developed the first model of a real-time intrusion detection system (IDS). This prototype was initially a rule-based expert system trained to detect known malicious activity. I like to think that this could be compared to today’s jamming detection and localization systems.
In the 1990s, the need for guidelines to provide general outlines as well as specific techniques for implementing security became a pressing one for all organizations. The first standard, originally published by the British Standards Institution (BSI) in 1995 was the BS 7799, was later adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 27000 series.
Information technology today can be security-evaluated via the Common Criteria (CC) standard (ISO/IEC 15408), which allows computer-systems certification. CC is a framework in which computer system users can specify their security functional and assurance requirements. The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140 is an alternative standard for cryptographic modules, developed by the U.S. Federal Information Processing Standards.
The Nessus Project, started by Renaud Deraison in 1998, set as its objective the provision of an open-source vulnerability-assessment tool. Since 2000, Nessus has become one of most popular tools for computer-network security and vulnerability assessment, used by more than 75,000 organizations worldwide.
ICT security today is assured in a lifecycle composed by CERT managing the threats notifications, ISO/IEC 27000 managing the processes, and CC/FIPS 140 defining the security requirements for the system and vulnerability assessment tools to certify the robustness.
Now, Where Are We in GNSS?
Radio-frequency interferences (RFI) or jamming cases can hardly be tracked, as they are difficult to detect and have a long history in the military domain. Recent incidents such the one at Newark International Airport show that the threat is increasing and demonstrate the need for mitigation strategies. GNSS signal falsification frauds, or spoofing, seems to as yet have no evident cases in the civil domain.
The Volpe Report of September 10, 2001 is one of the first government public announcements of GNSS threats, including jamming and spoofing. More than 10 years, later the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) experiment coordinated by Todd Humphreys at the University of Texas proved that such attacks are feasible.
In GNSS, jamming detection (and sometime mitigation) are nowadays commercial options for some professional and mass-market GNSS receivers. Spoofing detection has been available in commercial prototype receivers since 2008 (among others, the Trusted GNSS Receiver (TIGER) funded by the European GNSS Agency. In 2012 we have seen the presentation of the first civil GNSS security testbed. For examples of the latter, see the University of Texas TEXBAT initiative, mentioned on page 37, and the GNSS Authentication and User Protection System Simulator (GAUPSS) project, which involved the development of software and algorithms that were integrated and tested in the radio navigation laboratory of the European Space Agency/ European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESA/ESTEC) in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.
I will make the assertion that compared to ICT security, civil GNSS security seems to be reliving the early days of the 1980s: first publication of attack concepts, first publicly known attacks, no standards, and only prototype mitigation strategies. With a gap of almost 30 years, at least four mid-Earth orbit GNSS systems becoming operational in the next few years, and an annual 10 percent growth rate of GNSS applications, the era of civil GNSS security begins now.
The Question Why
Logan Scott is a consultant specializing in radio-frequency signal processing and waveform design for communications, navigation, radar, and emitter location. His opinion on the future threat leaves no doubts:
“In assessing security threats, an important starting question is ‘Why would someone do that?’ If there is no motivation, chances are, there won’t be an attack. Over the last five years or so, the combination of ubiquitous, low-cost communications systems and satellite navigation has moved civil GNSS positioning and timing into use domains where there are stronger motivations for an attack. Specifically, widespread use in asset monitoring and tracking encourages jamming attacks and so, we are seeing more such attack. As GNSS becomes more deeply embedded into societal infrastructure, we can expect to see more attacks of increasing sophistication. Motivation will be there.”
David Last is a consultant engineer and expert witness specializing in radio-navigation and communications systems. He operates in the domain of covert tracking and law enforcement,, an area where interference can be tempting. As expert in the field, and to the best of his knowledge, he believes that “although there are some cases of jamming, we have seen no events of spoofing — so far. To date, all we have seen from criminals are crude jamming attacks. Attacks by technically sophisticated aggressors who understand GNSS vulnerability have yet to start. They will be much more serious.
“Furthermore, when the receiver stops receiving data in a court case, we can’t say it’s jamming: we can mention that is one of the things that stops the signal. Law enforcement is now beginning to use receivers that can perform jamming detection.”
David Last’s opinion on the issue of potential low-cost spoofers appearing in the near future was also provocative: “Criminals don’t buy things, they steal them.”
The Time is Right, Now
An ICT security standard arrived about 10 years after the first publication and case reports of attacks. Are we at the right time, now, to consider security certification of GNSS receivers?
Logan Scott’s opinion is that receivers should be certified in order to provide awareness of the attacks:
“Today, essentially all houses and buildings have smoke alarms. Smoke alarms don’t put out fires but they do alert the occupants to the probability that there is a problem. Similarly, GNSS receiver situation awareness regarding jamming and spoofing is a first step towards militating against attacks on GNSS components. As civil receivers stand today, many don’t discriminate between loss of lock due to signal attenuation and loss of lock due to jamming. This needs to change.
“Fairly simple algorithms can detect most types of jamming and spoofing. Jammers and simple spoofers almost invariably affect automatic gain control gain settings. They are easy to detect. More sophisticated spoofers have difficulty covering apparent direction of arrival and can be detected using some simple antenna techniques.
“The problem for the user community at large is in knowing whether or not a receiver maintains adequate situational awareness. This is where test-based receiver certification can play a role.”
Awareness is indeed needed to notify to the application the security and authentication state. GNSS authentication integrated in the system still lies far off.
Not only is implementing authentication without compromising user cost and simplicity challenging, but the impact on the ground and space segment in GNSS to maintain legacy signals compatibility is also considerable.
We believe that user-based authentication will be the Plan B for the next 5–10 years. This requires the development of receiver techniques and the use of security testbeds as the baseline for vulnerability assessment, in the same way the Nessus tool was used in the 1990s for computer network assessment.
On the test approach, Logan Scott stresses that “Using a series of canned scenarios, GNSS receivers can be tested to determine how well they maintain situational awareness. Do well enough, and the receiver can be stamped as certified, much like an Underwriters Laboratory (UL) label. The test process can be automated and conducted by an independent third party, similar to the way cellular equipment is certified.
“Additional certifications might include cyber security aspects such as accepting only digitally-signed software updates and maps, providing attestation capabilities, and use of authenticatable GNSS signals.
“The benefit for the non-expert user community is that they have a basis for selecting GNSS receivers, secure in the knowledge that they meet minimum performance standards.”
Testing, Testing
Ringing in my third fellow expert, I asked Todd Humphreys, assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, for his opinion regarding the future of GNSS security testing.
“A testbed capable of simulating realistic spoofing attacks is needed so that the efficacy of proposed civil GPS signal authentication techniques can be experimentally evaluated. A generic testbed capable of evaluating all known authentication techniques would be prohibitively expensive; for example, it would require a large anechoic chamber for evaluating receiver-autonomous antenna-oriented techniques. But if the scope of evaluation is limited to receiver-autonomous signal-processing-oriented techniques and networked techniques, then it is possible not only to develop an inexpensive testbed but to share the testbed’s data component so that the tests can be replicated in laboratories across the globe.
“In October, we released the Texas Spoofing Test Battery (TEXBAT), a set of six high-fidelity digital recordings of live static and dynamic GPS L1 C/A spoofing tests conducted by the Radionavigation Laboratory of the University of Texas at Austin. National Instruments is hosting TEXBAT on cloud servers so that anyone can download it.
“The battery can be considered the data component of an evolving standard meant to define the notion of spoof resistance for civil GPS receivers. According to this standard, successful detection of or imperviousness to all spoofing attacks in TEXBAT, or a future version thereof, could be considered sufficient to certify a civil GPS receiver as spoof-resistant.
“This is a spoofing-specific version of the ‘not stupid’ certification that Logan Scott has suggested for GNSS receivers. In my July congressional testimony, I advocated requiring a ‘spoof resistance’ certification for GNSS devices that are used in critical infrastructure.”
Looking into the Future
Now I turn and attempt to answer the final question: Can we predict the future of civil GNSS security?
I believe that we can predict that, unfortunately, attacks will increase, and new attacks will be discovered. For example, we have been talking about deception jammers (also known as intelligent, PRN, or gold code jammers) only in the last few years, as an emerging threat. We will see certification and standards for security in GNSS, and we expect them to come in the next five years. Tools for GNSS security testing are already available commercially, for example the Qascom GNSS Security testbed (GST). As ICT has CERT for notification of threat, we will also see the raising of a GNSS emergency response team — possibly called a GERT.
In conclusion, whether my predictions turn out to be correct or not, the good news is that GNSS security also has a history in Hollywood’s annals: the 1997 James Bond movie Tomorrow Never Dies narrates a spoofing attack on the GPS navigation system of a submarine, performed via a GPS encoder that modifies the time.
Again, 007 anticipated the future, and he did it 15 years before a handful of world renowned GNSS security experts.
I have not yet seen the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall. I wonder what it portends?
Oscar Pozzobon is the director and co-founder of Qascom S.r.l., based in Bassano del Grappa, Italy. He received a Masters degree in telecommunication engineering from the University of Queensland, Australia, and is the Italian contact for the Civil Global Positioning System Service Interface Committee (CGSIC).
Affordability, Capability, and Back-to-Basics Acquisition
Headshot: Keoki Jackson
By Keoki Jackson
The history of GNSS shows each year has always been more successful than the year prior, and in 2013 we expect the trend to continue. In the United States, the role of GPS will continue to expand, and the applications for our technology will reach sectors we never imagined. As our international partner countries continue to launch GNSS satellites, and user equipment develops further, our community will increase its globalization, and international cooperation will reach new heights.
At the same time, our industry will see its fair share of challenges. We anticipate several significant trends to be further defined next year.
First, in the satellite world, affordability will be the name of the game. There is no disputing that the U.S. government is in austere budget times, and the Air Force will be asked to do more in acquiring GPS space, ground, and military user equipment, with fewer resources. Industry will partner with the Air Force in this new reality, and on the satellite manufacturing side, industry and government will need to demonstrate reduced costs, while sustaining the constellation and posturing for future demands.
It is no secret that military operations depend on GPS, and adversaries are working aggressively to erode the GPS combat advantage with low-cost jamming devices, spoofing concepts, or cyber attacks. On the user demand side, we expect the need for anti-jamming capability to become even more critical for military users. We also expect users to demand better accuracy and integrity, both in the military and civil communities. In 2013, the United States must secure its critical modernization efforts to meet these demands and bolster the space, ground, and user architecture against potential threats.
For us at Lockheed Martin, the message is clear. The threats and demands for enhanced capability are real, but the budget to meet those demands is shrinking. This presents a challenge, but we believe 2013 is the year we meet the challenge and position for the future.
GPS III, the Air Force’s next generation GPS satellite system, is a central part of the modernized solutions for the challenges laid out above. GPS III is the most affordable way to meet the increasing demand from users, while also prudently posturing the enterprise for the future. In 2013, we intend to prove that.
Space acquisition has weathered painful challenges in the past — that is not news — but the Air Force laid out the GPS III acquisition plan to reverse the trend and regain acquisition confidence. Leveraging hard-won lessons, the Air Force instilled a “back-to-basics” acquisition approach to provide better mission assurance, cost confidence, and schedule predictability. The approach emphasizes early investments in rigorous systems engineering, industry-leading parts standards, and the development of a fully functional GPS III satellite pathfinder to retire risks early and lower overall program costs. These investments early in the GPS III program were designed to prevent the types of engineering issues discovered on other programs late in the flight vehicle manufacturing process or even on orbit.
Back to Basics
The question in 2013 will be, “Is back-to-basics working?” — and we intend to show continued evidence of success next year. We will complete work on the GPS III Non-Flight Satellite Testbed (GNST), our full-sized GPS III satellite prototype. We will ship it to Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, for pathfinding activities at the launch site as we complete integration of the first space vehicle in our highly efficient GPS Processing Facility. The GNST is used to identify and solve development issues prior to integration and test of the first space vehicle. This will be a major milestone, putting the GNSS community on the cusp of fielding a new generation of PNT capabilities through very efficient and affordable production for all GPS III satellites.
Further proving out the back-to-basics acquisition approach, in 2013 we will be converting our options to build the next eight GPS III satellites to a fixed price contract structure, rather than cost-plus. This transition will limit the government’s risk and significantly contribute to Air Force affordability goals. The back-to-basics acquisition strategy and the progress we have already made on our GPS III prototype give us high confidence in our ability to perform efficient and affordable fixed-price satellite production going forward.
As the austere budget environment is amplified in 2013, we will focus our attention on our GPS III program performance while aggressively pursuing affordability and efficiency initiatives to ensure we are providing great value to the end user while being the best possible stewards of the American public’s investment.
User Demands
Affordability is one challenge; the other is meeting user demands. While the first GPS III satellites will bring on significant new capabilities, including improved accuracy, better anti-jam power, and a new civil signal to be interoperable with international GNSS systems, we do need to continue planning for technology upgrades in the future.
The Air Force laid out the GPS III program from the very beginning with evolution in mind — and the GPS III satellites have pre-architected capacity to add new capabilities and technologies affordably and with low risk. The acquisition plan calls for technology insertion beginning on the ninth satellite. 2013 will be a critical year in finalizing the production schedule for the capability insertion program.
We look at technology insertion in two ways: technology to reduce costs and technology to increase capabilities. To that end, we are developing dual launch, higher anti-jam signal power for the military, a new search and rescue payload, a digital navigation payload with the capability to incorporate new signals after launch, real time command and control cross links to improve system accuracy and a host of other innovations.
The timing for when these new capabilities will be on ramped onto new satellites will be determined by user demands and technical maturity. In 2013, we will be working very closely with the Air Force to implement a low risk ongoing modernization program to ensure GPS III meets the needs of users for decades to come while maintaining or reducing the per unit cost of a GPS III satellite.
In the uncertain and challenging environment of 2013 and beyond, GNSS technology will certainly continue to improve. User demand will increase significantly, while the resources to meet those demands will remain stable or decline. It is a tough challenge, but the GNSS industry has not disappointed yet, and we do not expect anything different in 2013 and beyond.
Dana (Keoki) Jackson is vice president of Navigation Systems in Space Systems Company’s Military Space line of business for Lockheed Martin Corporation. He is responsible for leading all aspects of the next-generation GPS III navigation satellite program for the United States Air Force, as well as operations and sustainment of the GPS IIR and IIRM satellites. Prior to joining Lockheed Martin, he was a NASA research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducting Space Shuttle flight experiments in the field of human adaptation to the space environment. He has a doctoral degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics fromthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Our first mistake is to presume an environment of perfection and security. Nothing is foolproof and spoof-free. Every product or service is an envelope of packaging that can be opened, peeled back, reversed engineered, and replicated. I have seen “ultimate security” defeated repeatedly.
GPS is no exception, of course. We put our signatures and seals on these things; enterprising competitors, adversaries, and curious people find a way to steam open our envelopes, create seals indistinguishable from the original, or simply use products in ways unexpected.
We exist in a world headed pell-mell toward the product consumerization, as GPS World tells us, as if this is new. We BYOD [bring your own device, a business policy of employees bringing personally owned mobile devices to their place of work and using those devices to access privileged company resources such as email, file servers, and databases, as well as their personal applications and data. — Ed.] to work with its purchase by credit card and reimbursement by petty cash. This is nothing new than a newer terminology for mass-merchandizing.
Wars will be fought that way too, as if they always weren’t. Soldiers built their own grenades, brought their own weapons, horses, uniforms, and food to the contested game … always. Patton had his own pair of pearl-handled Colt sidearms.
The pressure for encrypted GPS and inconvenient milspec devices misses this reality. Our every weapon will fail unintentionally, get repurposed by knowledgeable adversaries, and be turned intentionally against us. We cannot engineer away these consequences. We can only be better readers. We must be flexible competitors. We have to be open to the reality that everything fails in ways we will not anticipate but should expect.
War is not fought in rows with toy soldiers equal and alike arrayed with fair rules. Fourth generation warfare is here. War is an expediency when diplomacy, economics, and reason fail with adversaries and friends alike. It is fought with a dangerous expediency.
Activities of the European Navigation Support Office
Headshot: Werner Enderle
By Werner Enderle
The European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany operates spacecraft on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA) and maintains the ground facilities and expertise for ESA and other institutional and commercial customers. ESOC is composed of two departments: the Mission Operations Department and the Ground Systems Engineering Department, of which the Navigation Support Office is an integral part. The main objectives of the Navigation Support Office (NSO)are the provision of expertise for high-accuracy navigation, satellite geodesy, and the generation of related products and services for all ESA missions and for third-party customers, as well as supporting the European GNSS Programmes: Galileo and EGNOS.
In 2013, the NSO will conduct a number of projects and activities, described here.
European GNSS
The Navigation Office provides support in the area of data processing and analysis, performance analysis. It performs operational orbit predictions for the International Satellite Laser Ranging Service (ILRS), operational precise/rapid orbit and clock determination, computation of antenna patterns, and provides support to Galileo Sensor Stations (GSS) site deployment and to Ranging and Integrity Monitoring Station (RIMS) deployment. It also provides consultancy on modeling and data processing, mission analysis for the constellation, orbit validation activities for orbits and clocks, ionosphere, group delays, and intersystem biases, and is involved in the generation of the Galileo Geodetic Reference Frame. Furthermore, the Office participated in European Commission studies for the Galileo Commercial Service.
Earth Observation Missions
A number of European and American missions have been equipped with radar altimeter instruments that observe the level of the sea surface from space. To do this, the height component of the satellite orbits needs to be determined with centimeter-accuracy, matching the accuracy of the altimeter observations. The NSO provides support to Precise Orbit Determination (POD), evaluation, analysis and improvement of models and standards, as well as instrument calibration (radar altimeter and GNSS antenna).
Examples of missions already supported include ERS, Envisat, Cryosat, GOCE and also non-ESA missions JASON 1&2. Solutions with multiple simultaneous data types (GNSS, SLR, DORIS, altimetry, S-band range, Doppler, and angle tracking) are typically performed, allowing the alignment of different reference frames and estimation of inter-system and instrument biases. Based on all these capabilities, the NSO is one of the leading institutions for low-Earth orbiting (LEO) satellite POD activities and very well suited for supporting the upcoming European programme for Earth Observation, called Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) and its related Sentinel satellite missions.
Automated Transfer Vehicle
The Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) is part of the European contribution to the International Space Station (ISS) program. The main tasks of the ATV are to provide logistics supply, station re-boost and ISS waste retrieval. The rendezvous of the ATV and ISS is based on a real-time on-board relative navigation concept, using GPS data from receivers of ISS and ATV. The NSO conducts in this context simulations before the flight and also post facto performance analysis of the relative orbit determination accuracy to support the ATV missions.
Space Situation Awareness
An important atmospheric application of GNSS data is the monitoring of ionospheric activity (total electron content or TEC). Dual-frequency GNSS signals enable direct measurement of this parameter, and by merging the data from hundreds of globally distributed GPS receivers, detailed maps of the TEC and its evolution as a function of time can be constructed. Such maps have been computed routinely for many years. FIGURE 1 shows an example. The importance of these products lies in the fact that high solar activity leads to high TEC values, which can seriously disturb satellite communications. The NSO provides ionospheric TEC maps to the scientific community.
International GNSS Services
ESA/ESOC was one of the founding members of the IGS, and at the time the NSO was implemented at ESOC, all of the IGS activities were transferred to the NSO. ESA Analysis Centre products are among the best products available from the individual IGS analysis centres. Secondly, the ESA products are among the few multi-constellation GNSS products. ESA was the first IGS analysis centre to provide a consistent set of orbit and clock products for all available GNSS satellites. These products constituted the very first products that have been used for true GNSS precise point positioning.
The sampling rate of the ESA final GPS+GLONASS clock product is 30 seconds. FIGURE 2 shows the statistics of a kinematic PPP analysis using the ESA GNSS clocks for three different cases. The ESA/ESOC IGS Analysis centre contributes to all of the core IGS analysis centre products: Final GNSS (GPS+GLONASS) products provided weekly based on 24-hour solutions using 150 stations from true GNSS solutions simultaneously and fully consistently processing GPS and GLONASS measurements for a total of around 55 satellites, consisting of orbits, clocks, coordinates, ionosphere, and Earth-orientation parameters (EOPs). Also Rapid GNSS (GPS+GLONASS) products (available within 3 hours after the end of the observation day) and Ultra-Rapid GNSS (GPS+GLONASS) products (4 times per day, available within 3 hours after the end of the observation interval) are provided. These products are publicly available to the scientific community, being published at several data servers, such as the CDDIS at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. They are also finding very frequent application in testing of experimental and commercial applications, and have become the standard reference for all high-precision GNSS applications.
Figure 2. Kinematic PPP analysis using ESA GNSS clocks: GLONASS-only PPP (red); GPS-only, (green), and a truee GNSS-PP (blue).
Third-Party Activities
Different customers have different needs. One important customer for the Navigation Facility is the Metop mission operated by EUMETSAT. For the exploitation of its GNSS Receiver for Atmospheric Sounding (GRAS) payload, which delivers atmospheric profiles to the European Met offices, EUMETSAT requires GPS products with a guarantee on accuracy, availability and latency. To deliver this service, the Navigation Facility now hosts the operation of the GRAS Ground Support Network (GSN), which is a dedicated network of 45 stations. It has been operating successfully for five years, delivering products with a latency of only 45 minutes, and an availability of better than 99 percent. Based on these, EUMETSAT delivers a daily set of more than 500 atmospheric profiles (and double that number as soon as Metop-2 will be operational) to the European Met offices, a data set that has already become one of the key elements in numerical weather prediction.
Real-Time Processing
Over the last 10 years, ESOC has embarked on a program to build a Real Time GNSS software infrastructure. The main justification for this effort is the realization that the delivery of precise GNSS products in real-time processing will become increasingly more important for the user community. ESOC needs to be at the forefront of these developments, particularly with respect to products related to Galileo. The system for REal TIme NAvigation (RETINA) has been modelled after ESOC’s experience in real-time satellite control systems and includes many of the elements for data processing, archiving, and visualization that are common to such systems. In particular, it implements a specially designed circular filing system for streaming data, allowing maintenance-free operations for processing and archiving of data and products, and seamless transitions from historical to live data processing.
The investment in GNSS software and receiver infrastructure has enabled ESOC to participate in the IGS Real Time Pilot Project, assuming the roles of Real Time Analysis Centre and Analysis Centre Coordinator. In the latter role, ESOC has been generating and disseminating the IGS Real Time Combination stream after processing the real-time solutions from up to ten analysis centres. Included in these solutions are two streams generated by the ESOC Real Time Analysis Centre.
Standardization Activities
Participation in the IGS Real Time activities has stimulated ESOC’s involvement in the development of standards and formats for GNSS data and products. ESOC has been instrumental in the decision of the IGS to join the Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Services (RTCM), which is the primary standards setting organisation for real-time GNSS services. ESOC is now one of two agencies that represent the IGS at the RTCM meetings.
Work with the RTCM focuses on:
development of standards and formats for transmission of multi-constellation observations in real time (RTCM-MSM);
development of standards and formats for the transmission of real-time orbit and clock products (RTCM-SSR);
Further development of the RINEX standard for generation of multi-GNSS batch observation files.
Expertise and Areas of Activities
To comply with the main objectives of the NSO, the main pillars of expertise and areas of activities can be summarized as:
Precise orbit determination at centimeter-level accuracy for satellites in low-Earth orbits such as Earth observation missions, and satellites in medium-Earth orbits, typically GNSS satellites.
Development of state-of-the-art models and algorithms for high-precision orbit and clock determination, based on the capability to process all geodetic data types, namely GNSS, satellite laser ranging, Doppler Orbitography and Radiopositioning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS), altimetry, and S-band tracking data.
Realization of Geodetic Reference Frame.
Operation of global distributed real-time sensor stations and networks, based on remote control of GNSS receivers.
The capability to operate complex navigation software infrastructure to generate operational products and services for a wide variety of applications.
Involvment in several international organized and coordinated activities. Besides being an IGS analysis center, ESOC’s NSO is also an analysis centre for the IDS and ILRS services.
Operational Facility
ESOC’s ESOC’s Navigation Facility (see FIGURE 3) provides a fully operational environment, compliant with ESA’s ECSS ground segment standards. The Navigation Facility consists of a control room including secure operational LAN (ESACERT against intruders from outside) with two physically separated computer and data centres for redundancy purposes and a globally distributed operational real time sensor station network (see FIGURE 4). An operational system availability of more than 99.9 percent on a 24/7 basis measured over the last 5 years (products delivered every 15 minutes) has been demonstrated.
Currently the sensor station network consists of 12 sites, but ESOC is extending the global network to at least 25 sites. Negotiations with new sites are currently ongoing or near completion. The objective is to deploy a homogeneous (all sites will have the same receiver and same antenna type) sensor station network by the third quarter of 2013. The deployment of new equipment on existing sites began in April 2012, and first results are very promising. The new type of geodetic quality GNSS receiver has been chosen, based on an internal selection process, and deployment is under way. Each receiver has 264 physical channels, is capable of multi-signal, multi-frequency and multi-constellation tracking and will be remotely controlled from the Navigation Facility at ESOC.
Software Packages
The NSO develops, maintains and operates a range of software packages and tools for high-precision orbit- and clock determination and prediction. The software capability also includes the estimation of station coordinates, Earth-orientation parameters, model parameters (radiation pressure, drag, and so on), ionosphere, troposphere, instrument biases, intersystem biases, ambiguities and antenna phase-centre variations based on state-of-the-art models and standards (for example, IERS, ITRF).
The main software packages used within the NSO are:
NAPEOS, which is the ESOC standard for high-precision navigation tasks. NAPEOS is used for almost all projects and is compliant with the highest navigation accuracy requirements, based on batch processing techniques with the capability to process different types of geodetic observations.
RETINA, the NSO’s real time software package for GNSS based precise navigation. This software is based on Kalman Filter techniques and has a closely coordinated interface to NAPEOS.
IONMON, processing GNSS data and producing ionosphere information and TEC map predictions.
In this context it is important to mention that ESA owns all the intellectual property rights to these software packages and that licences for operationally qualified software can be released on request to European companies, universities and R&D 0rganisations (currently only NAPEOS).
Summary and Outlook
The Navigation Support Office offers a combination of different capabilities, namely highest quality software, tools for real-time and batch processing ( the Office is the only analysis centre capable of processing three different geodetic techniques within a single software package), operation of own global GNSS sensor station network and demonstrated operational experience for mission support and provision of services. Operations are conducted in a controlled environment, fully in accordance with ESA safety and security standards.
The Navigation Support Office is ready for multi-frequency, multi-signal and multi constellation GNSS data processing. The Office is involved and strongly committed to support Galileo and EGNOS. In this context, the Office will soon become the consortium leader for the provision of the Galileo Geodetic Reference Frame.
Concerning the participation to international GNSS activities like IGS, ICG and GNSS standardisation aspects, the Navigation Support Office intends to continue its support for the foreseeable future.
In the area of LEO POD, the Navigation Support Office offers POD capability for all types of LEO satellites. For this reason, the Office intends to play a major role in the precise orbit determination activities for the European GMES Sentinel satellite missions.
Finally, the Navigation Support Office also intends to increase its capabilities related to navigation concepts for high-precision satellite formation flying and satellite constellations, via specific research and development activities. The aim is to maintain and expand its capabilities as a very attractive partner with cutting edge know-how and technology for the support of ESA activities and European industry.
Werner Enderle is the head of the Navigation Support Office at ESA\ESOC. Previously, he worked at the European GNSS Authority (GSA) as the Head of System Evolutions. He also worked for the European Commission, in charge of the procurement for the Galileo Ground Control Segment. He holds a doctoral degree in aerospace engineering from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany.
Co-authors: Rene Zandbergen, Tim Springer, and Loukis Agrotis.
A GPS Look-Alike to Compensate for Poor Indoor, Urban Availability
Editor’s Note: This article reproduces the acceptance speeches given by the winners of GPS World’s 2012 Leadership Awards, at the Leadership Dinner in Nashville in September. The Leadership Dinner was sponsored by Lockheed Martin and Deimos Space.
Remarks by Waldemar Kunysz
Senior Staff Engineer, winner in the Services category. He works on Wide-Area Positioning System (WAPS) design and implementation in the continental United States. He spent the previous 16 years with NovAtel, Inc., working on various research projects and novel antenna designs.
I am much honored to receive this award and recognition. It means a lot to me.
I would like to thank the people who made a difference in my career. Without them it would not be possible for me to be here.
First I am grateful to Dr. Maurice Meyer, former MIT professor. He taught me the black magic of antenna engineering. I am quite sure that his spirit guided me when I invented the GPS/GNSS Pinwheel antenna when working at NovAtel, for which I received six patents.
I also would like to thank Prof. Gerard Lachapelle and Dr. AJ Van Dierendock for teaching me GPS technology and Dr. Phillip Ward for providing very useful insight on the subject of interference. That knowledge saved me countless hours when troubleshooting some system-level issues while designing current and past GPS/GNSS products.
Currently I am working at NextNav LLC, developing technologies related to NextNav’s new terrestrial based Wide Area Positioning System (WAPS). Founded in 2008 and based in Sunnyvale, California, NextNav has designed a new positioning system that is being initially deployed across the United States, although we anticipate taking our technology to global markets in the future. In its short life, in addition to developing the technology necessary for a timing-based, high-accuracy terrestrial positioning system, NextNav has already established a network presence in 40 of the largest U.S. metropolitan areas. This system allows the reception of a GPS-like signal in the areas where satellite coverage is weak or non-existent, such as indoors or in dense urban developments, that is, downtowns, urban canyons, and so on. We already have completed a fully-deployed service capability in the San Francisco Bay area that enables consistently accurate indoor and outdoor positioning anywhere from San Francisco to San Jose, and we are growing our network footprint across the United States. We are also very excited to have developed a height system that has demonstrated consistent floor-level accuracy, a feature that is particularly valuable indoors.
As we know, all major terrestrial systems, such as Loran, Omega and Decca, have been shut down in the past several years. We have become very dependent on satellite-based services such as GPS and GLONASS without any terrestrially-based back-up. Any major solar storm in the future could be very disruptive to this service, so having a terrestrial-based system that is in sync with the satellite-based system will fill that void. And of course, a terrestrial system can be maintained and improved on a significantly shorter schedule, with significantly lower cost, than a space-based system. NextNav really provides an excellent complement to GPS.
The future looks very bright for the positioning service industry. In my opinion, by 2020 it will become another ubiquitously-available utility such as phone or power. I’d like to agree with my other awardee and predict that in 2020 we will be able to have a carrier-based positioning accuracy anywhere and anytime, available from any devices including handheld units. You will know where all your assets are and you won’t need to post a question to your wife: “Honey, did you see where my tie is?” Your personal digital assistant will locate it for you.
CYGNSS, Others Deliver Now and in Future for Global Weather Forecast
Editor’s Note: This article reproduces the acceptance speeches given by the winners of GPS World’s 2012 Leadership Awards, at the Leadership Dinner in Nashville in September. The Leadership Dinner was sponsored by Lockheed Martin and Deimos Space.
Martin Unwin, Surrey Satellite Technology Limited; Principal GNSS Engineer, winner in the Satellites category. He is a key member of the team that built the GIOVE-A satellite (recently retired) and is now working on the Galileo FOC satellites. He is also recognized for his work on space-borne receivers.
Headshot: Martin Unwin, Surrey Satellite Technology, winner in the Satellites category.
I feel privileged and honored to receive this award from GPS World, and I am truly sorry now that I chose this year not to attend the ION-GNSS conference to receive it!
With respect to the achievements in GIOVE-A and Galileo, I cannot claim this award on behalf of myself, but I will claim it on behalf of the people in Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL) who made the projects possible, and to those in the team here who have been working tirelessly to make the payloads and satellites happen. We are of course partnered with others in Europe that have been laboring equally hard, so it has been a true team effort.
With respect to the spaceborne GPS and GNSS activities, my achievements have only been possible thanks to the top-class staff we have in the receivers team, and thanks are also due to the support we have had from the rest of SSTL.
In the 20 years I have been in the company, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd has grown from a small university-based department to a major player in the international space scene, and I am immensely proud to have been part of this story.
A Few Words for the Future
Whilst it cannot quite match the early heady days of GPS, I still think nevertheless we are entering an exciting time in the GNSS world. We have two operational systems, and within a few years, we will be seeing two more reaching operational capability. Dual- and even triple-frequency civil signals will soon become operationally available, and some very wide bandwidth signals will be sent down, in particular, by Galileo. There is bound to be a steep learning curve in understanding how to exploit these new signals, with a few crevasses to be negotiated during the climb. But these new signals are bound to lead to an expanded vista of increased accuracy and robustness, and undoubtedly some unexpected destinations.
Taking perhaps the highest perspective, spaceborne remote sensing is a good example that has surprising relevance to the rest of us still on the ground. In this case, GNSS satellites are used as radar sources, and all that is required on a low-Earth orbiting (LEO) satellite to change the world is a GNSS receiver. GPS radio-occultation measurements from low-Earth orbit are now already the third most important data source for our global weather forecasts, thanks to the like of the COSMIC and MetOp satellites.
Furthermore, a new constellation of satellites called CYGNSS has recently announced by NASA that will be using ocean-reflected GPS signals to probe inside hurricanes and typhoons, and for the first time will enable the sensing of the wide-scale ocean roughness, leading to improved global wind and wave knowledge. By adding to this spaceborne receiver the ability to accommodate signals from GLONASS, Galileo, and Compass, plus any other available GNSS-type signals, the number of measurements is instantly quadrupled, and a new capability in sensing the atmosphere, waves, and even ice and land is likely to be seen. Meteorologists already view GPS as an emerging utility for weather and climate sensing, but I think this new role for GNSS will be reinforced and expanded into yet another area where GNSS incontrovertibly, if indirectly, makes such a significant difference to our daily lives.
As with many other applications where GNSS has become important or even critical to our modern world, this is, at the same time, both a blessing and a matter for some caution.
Fully Operational System Modernizes for the Multi-GNSS World
Headshot: Vitaly Davydov and Sergey Revnivykh
By Vitaly Davydov and Sergey Revnivykh
Since December 2011, the GLONASS system has been fully operational, providing worldwide service with 100 percent global availability and acceptable accuracy for most users. The system is globally accepted by many users, and most leading manufacturers include GLONASS in their devices.
This fact became a reality due to the successful completion in December 2011 of the Russian Federal Mission Oriented Program dedicated to GLONASS restoration, under the under permanent supervision and control of the President of the Russian Federation and Russian Government, Vladimir Putin.
It may have seemed back in 2002 that very few people outside the GLONASS team believed in the success of the Program, when the constellation was composed of six operational satellites with only a 3-year lifetime. But now the GLONASS constellation consists of 24 modernized operational Glonass-M satellites and in-orbit spares. Further, the new generation GLONASS-K satellite flight tests have begun.
The GLONASS Program obtained significant support in May 2007 when the famous Decree of the President of the Russian Federation was issued. The President made commitments to sustain the GLONASS system and provide its open service free of charge and available for all users worldwide without any restrictions. At the same time, the President charged the Government to prepare and approve the new GLONASS Program for 2020. The new Federal Mission Oriented Program ,designated GLONASS maintenance, development and use for 2012–2020, was approved by the Government of the Russian Federation on March 3, 2012 with a dedicated article in the State Budget Law. That means that the President’s commitments are supported by real financial resources for the next decade, and the situation of the mid-1990s will never occur to GLONASS again.
The new Program has three major tasks:
To keep GLONASS in full operational mode.
To significantly improve GLONASS performance and service quality.
To provide conditions for worldwide use.
The tasks to make GLONASS an integral component of the global GNSS infrastructure, providing worldwide service for all users, are challenging. At the same time, the primary goal of GLONASS as a dual-use system is to serve national security interests.
What the Future Brings
GLONASS development in the near future is foreseen in a few key directions.
Space Segment. Modernization of the GLONASS core, called the Space Complex, undertakes the development of new spacecraft with enhanced performance. This means more stable on-board clocks, new code-division multiple-access (CDMA) signals, and intersatellite link for orbit, clock update, and range measurements. The GLONASS-K satellite will be the new generation spacecraft, applying advanced technologies.
The first-phase GLONASS-K satellite is already passing flight tests, transmitting new CDMA signal in L3 band in addition to the existing set of FDMA signals. The GLONASS-K of the second modernization phase will transmit the full set of new CDMA signals in L1, L2 and L3 bands.
At the same time, all new GLONASS satellites will continue transmitting the existing set of frequency-division multiple-access (FDMA) signals, providing backward compatibility with existing user equipment. Implementation of the CDMA signals in L5 and in L1 (1575.42 MHz) bands is also in line with the Signal Modernization Concept. This task is undergoing study to optimize the power and mass budget of future satellites and to consider benefits for users. Finally, new CDMA signals will provide better accuracy, better protection to interference and better service for users.
GLONASS modernization foresees extending the number of operational satellites in constellation available for users. Presently navigation message enables maximum 24 satellites for users. Activities in order to get more operation satellites available, assumes modernization of the existing FDMA almanac. New almanac of CDMA signals has no limitations.
Ground Segment. Ground-control segment modernization will produce a monitoring-station network extension to provide global coverage, extension of the uplink-station network to provide more frequent updates of orbit and clock, and system clock modernization to make the system time scale more stable and better synchronized with UTC.
The new geodesy reference PZ-90.11 is already coordinated with the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) at the centimeter level and shall be introduced soon.
Augmentation. The System for Differential Correction and Monitoring (SDCM) space-based augmentation system is dedicated to improving navigation services, providing integrity data and better accuracy for users. As a first phase, the service area of SDCM is over the Russian territory. For SBAS signal re-transmission, the three GEO communication satellites of the Luch system are equipped with navigation transponders. The first Luch-5A is already in orbit. The other two are scheduled for launch. Eventually the SDCM system will provide a global navigation service, transmitting precise orbit and clock data to users and introducing precise-point positioning (PPP) technique.
Performance Improvements. The GLONASS modernization plan foresees step-by-step performance improvement of all system components. By 2020, the GLONASS system in stand-alone mode will provide sub-meter accuracy for users with an open signal. Augmented by SBAS, the GLONASS system will provide user positioning accuracy at the decimeter level and better.
In the coming Multi-GNSS world, the GLONASS system must be one of the key components to benefit all users with reliable and accurate navigation, positioning, and timing services. To reach that goal, the international cooperation between system providers with feedback from all group of users is a mandatory condition. All global and regional navigation satellite systems must be compatible and interoperable. The International Committee on GNSS, established according to UN recommendation, plays a significant role for international cooperation aimed at achieving synergy in the navigation environment.
2013 is very important for GLONASS to demonstrate stability with improvement for all users around the world. All the necessary resources to achieve this are available, based on the long-term Federal Mission Oriented Program supported by the President and the Government of the Russian Federation.
Vitaly Davydov is the deputy head of the Federal Space Agency, Coordinator of the Program for GLONASS Sustainment, Development, and Use. He graduated from the Dzerzhinsky Military Academy and from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration with a Master‘s degree in Public and Municipal Administration. From 1997 to 2004 Vitaly Davydov supported the Russian Federation Security Council’s Office. Prior to that from 1975 to 1997 he occupied various positions in Russian Department of Defense’s Space Forces.
Sergey Revnivykh is deputy director general of the Central Research Institute of Machine Building, leading institute of Federal Space Agency, Head of PNT (Positioning, Navigation and Time) Analysis and Information Center. He is a member of the management of the Federal GLONASS Program. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Moscow Aviation Institute.
GPS Directorate: Receivers Will Operate in Environments Impossible Today
By Col. Bernie Gruber
Headshot: Col. Bernie Gruber
I believe the future of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) and particularly GPS will only be limited by our ingenuity and imagination. In terms of economic benefit, GPS contributes $60 billion to our economy, and that’s no stretch considering the positive and real advantages GPS affords us every day through fuel savings, transportation optimization, banking transactions, recreational activities, and certainly the defense of our great nation.
GPS consists of three segments — space, ground and user equipment — all contributing synchronistically to provide the world positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT). Having joined the GPS program office (for the first time) in 1992, I was privileged to lead the very first Foreign Military Sales contracts and the development of the Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing module (SAASM) — both focused within the realm of user equipment. As program director of GPS reflecting back on the monumental change of the past 20 years, I am encouraged and look forward to seeing the fruition of the projects and plans we have already set in motion for the next 20. This is why:
Space Segment. The launch and handover of the third GPS IIF satellite on October 4 proves once again our commitment to mission success. We have exceeded our published worldwide accuracy standard since 1993, and the NavStar GPS constellation remains robust with 31 satellites currently available.
In regards to the satellite systems, next-generation Block IIF and III satellites are in various states of test, integration, or production in an effort to improve the average user range error (URE) from 0.9 meters, achieved and maintained for the last 3 years, to a root-mean-squared URE of 0.5 meters by 2016. Along with increased civil and military signals, I also envision digital waveform generation (that is, the ability to change on-orbit signals in space via software) as an integral part of our architecture. Digital waveform generation coupled with an augmentation of the GPS III constellation for affordability and resiliency will pave our way to the future.
Ground Segment. Along with a host of additional satellite capabilities and signals, we will correspondingly modernize our ground segment. Our Next-Generation Operational Control System (OCX) is designed to command and control our modernized secondary civil signal L2C, safety-of-life signal L5, and the internationally compatible signal L1C. In fact, users such as John Deere and NavCom are already accessing the currently broadcast L1 C/A and L2C (with a default code) for dual-frequency ionospheric correction to improve upon accuracy. As the modernized signals become operational, users will see faster signal acquisition, enhanced reliability, and a greater operating range. The information assurance, expandability, and service-oriented architecture will afford users and operators with security and information they simply don’t have today.
User Segment. All that said, I am thrilled to look at the future of user equipment. We need to take advantage of the use of civil GPS. Apple and Android have shown the way to interface with and use applications, displays, and packaging; Google Map overlays, smart phone apps, time-to-first-fix augmentations from cell towers, and multi-GNSS international coverage are already in use, with the growth of apps, users will only get smarter and more sophisticated in their GPS expectations.
To that end, the Air Force is augmenting its pilots with digital maps and starting to integrate GPS with the digi-maps beginning with the C-130J. The Army is paving the way with an app store for military use and beginning to integrate GPS with its equipment, such as the use of a GPS integrated wind app for calibrating bullet trajectories.
Security, authentication, integrity, and the ability to operate in almost any environment is vital to our warfighters. The Department of Defense is posturing to operate in an anti-access area denial (A2AD) environment. Make no mistake; the list of potential adversaries also includes a list of known attacks on GPS — along with use of GPS and other GNSS systems against us. For that purpose, the modernized GPS is working on better and improved items like key management, M-Code power and cryptography, and Blue Force Electronic Attack (BFEA). In this area too, I see the commercial market burgeoning with new ideas to protect the calculation of GPS PNT solutions.
In the selective-availability anti-spoofing module, we introduced positive control and resiliency to the military GPS receivers. Now with M-Code we are taking it one step further. M-code will leverage the National Security Agency (NSA) Key Management Infrastructure and augment it with more tools to ensure only authorized users have access to M-Code. This provides greater protection from spoofing, ensures that keys are readily available to the United States and her Coalition partners, and that security cost drives for our user equipment are minimized.
With more signal power, almost every aspect of GPS is better. While the 6–10 dB of additional power in GPS III will not in itself defeat known threats, more power complements anti-jam techniques as well as improves operation under foliage and in the presence of pervasive unintentional interference. We’re going to see receivers that operate in navwar environments that would be impossible today. Similarly, I see us having the flexibility to operate with other GNSS systems in benign environments, but the ability to also operate in hostile or contested environments.
Blue Force Electronic Attack was always a principle driver for GPS modernization. It is embodied in the White House Directives and Title 10 U.S.C [Title 10 of the United States Code outlines the role of armed forces in the U.S. Code, a compilation and codification of the general and permanent federal laws of the United States — Ed.] Today’s Block II systems do not have enough spectral separation for effective BFEA. As M-Code becomes readily available, along with the additional filtering available in military GPS user equipment (MGUE), we are providing Joint Task Force Commanders with options to deny GPS; options that they don’t have today.
The future of GPS is bright indeed! From the originators of GPS to present day men and women who work tirelessly to deliver and operate it, we are all striving to improve and enhance this magnificent capability. The economic benefits of a system that, in reality, pays for itself guarantees the world’s desire to see improvements and growth in the overall GPS system. The Air Force is a proud steward of the GPS system, but it is our collective job to proliferate new ideas to use it and secure it.
Colonel Bernie J. Gruber is director, Global Positioning Systems (GPS) Directorate, Space and Missile Systems Center, Air Force Space Command, Los Angeles Air Force Base, California. He is responsible for a multiservice, multinational systems directorate which conducts development, acquisition, fielding and sustainment of all GPS space segment, satellite command and control (ground) and military user equipment. The $32 billion GPS program, with a $1 billion annual budget, maintains the largest satellite constellation and the largest avionics integration and installation program in the Department of Defense. He has served in key positions at Major Command, Air Staff, Joint Staff and Defense Agency levels. Prior to assuming his current position, Colonel Gruber was Chief, Space Superiority and Global Integrated Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Division, Directorate of Programs, Deputy Chief of Staff, Strategic Plans and Programs, Headquarters, United States Air Force, Washington, D.C.
Editor’s Note: This article reproduces the acceptance speeches given by the winners of GPS World’s 2012 Leadership Awards, at the Leadership Dinner in Nashville in September. The Leadership Dinner was sponsored by Lockheed Martin and Deimos Space.
Remarks by Todd Humphreys, Radionavigation Laboratory (director), University of Texas at Austin (assistant professor), winner in the Signals category. He is the leader of several seminal studies on spoofing and jamming, and he testified this summer before Congress on the subject.
It’s a genuine honor to receive this award. I’d like to thank Alan Cameron and all the contributors to GPS World. GPS World plays an essential role in building our GNSS community and keeping it together, providing GNSS news, instruction, and, indispensably, gossip!
I’d also like to thank my students at the University of Texas Radionavigation Lab. Much of the credit for this award goes to them.
The futurist Ray Kurzweil spoke at a conference I attended back in 2001. Maybe some of you have heard of Ray. He’s regarded variously as a prophet, or a crackpot. He’s taking hundreds of vitamins every day to keep himself alive until the singularity arrives, at which point he’ll download himself onto a robot and live forever, or at least he’ll have his head cryogenically frozen so that he can be downloaded and live forever later on.
In that 2001 talk, Ray made some bold predictions. One, in particular, I remember well. “Within the decade,” Ray assured us, “we’ll all be wearing special contact lenses that give us a permanant Internet feed directly to our eyeballs.”
Nonsense, I thought, and indeed it was nonsense. Here we are in 2012 and no such contact lenses exist, nevermind their being in widespread use.
I resolved back then that if I were ever called on to peer into the future and tell what I see, as Alan has asked me to do tonight, I’d be more modest about it.
So tonight I’m going to make a modest prediction, and only one of them. I predict that by the GPS World dinner in 2020, carrier-phase differential GNSS, or, if you prefer an adjective for what should be a noun, Real-Time Kinematic, will be cheap and pervasive. We’ll have it on our cell phones and our tablets. There will be app families devoted to decimeter- and centimeter-level accuracy. The consequences will be fantastic. And this will be enormously disruptive to the current precision navigation industry. This will be the commoditization of centimeter-level GNSS.
Now you may very well object to this prediction. You might point out that integer ambiguities will be difficult to resolve in the face of the near-field effects around and poor placement of the GNSS antenna in handheld units. You might also argue that the increased power requirements of carrier-phase techniques will be a dealbreaker for mobile devices. That’s all fine. I agree that those are hard problems. My students and I are looking into them, trying to overcome them.
But please don’t make as one of your objections the one that I’ve heard so many times: “Why would anyone ever want centimeter-accurate positioning in their cell phone?” Because I’ll object that your objection lacks imagination.
To see one example of what could be done with commoditized centimeter-accurate GNSS, I invite you all to a presentation by my students Daniel Shepard, Ken Pesyna, and Jahshan Bhatti tomorrow in the F5 Session (Millimeter-accurate Augmented Reality Enabled by Carrier-Phase Differential GPS). They’ll show off a crude box that we’ve built, through which, if you peer, you can see a sandcastle that’s not really there. And you can walk around the sandcastle and see it from all sides with centimeter accuracy.
Imagine when this technology is in our tablets! Or, better yet, when it’s in our glasses — or, I suppose, our contact lenses. Not that I’m making any predictions about contact lenses.
[Ed. For a short video demonstration of the RTK-enabled augmented reality box built by Todd Humphreys’ students, visit this site.]
Some of you have been asking questions, and while it is generally our business to provide answers, in this case I simply show these questions back to you, for instructive purposes.
They come from the 2012 State of the Industry Survey, reported in the September issue. In that survey, we posed one question whose results were not reflected in that report. It was “What questions do you think it would be interesting and illuminating to ask in the 2013 State of the Industry Survey?”
Herewith those questioning answers — er, those answering questions:
What effect will the aging satellite system have, and what are you doing to plan for an alternative?
Which industry is the most powerful to impose its technology standard? For example, it seems that any technology not compatible with mobiles or tablets is not alive anymore.
What is the estimated financial impact that GNSS have, and how would it affect your life if we didn’t have them?
With the technology of the GNSS equipment constantly improving, how important is it that the end user be a licensed professional?
The prices of Chinese products — are they directly affecting your sales, or are your customers taking these low prices as a starting point for negotiation?
Should precision and accuracy be government regulated?
What will be the next game changer for positioning? Will it be all encompassing like GPS? Or will there be multiple positioning options depending on your need? (indoors, urban corridor, dense veg., accuracy needs, and so on).
How can the cost of modern survey equipment be subsidized for developing countries?
How long will multi-chip solutions maintain dominance compared to separated solutions where technological development and cost reduction is even faster?
What alternative tracking methodology will replace GPS/GNSS as the most common?
What are the cost and practical barriers to innovating new consumer and business products? Are you willing to throw away existing products to distribute new products?
How accurate is good enough?
Is replacement of staff with technical skills a concern?
Should the recent demonstration of commandeer-via-spoofing have been so widely publicized — or should that development have been classified?
Have your customers expressed concern about GPS tracking and their privacy?
What will it take to get RTK GNSS receiver manufacturers to standardize on one correction data format? What portion of revenues is invested in GNSS-related research and development at your company?
What is the status of the National PNT Architecture jointly developed by the US DoD and DOT? Is it viable, or is it dead?
The FCC director was on drugs the day they granted LightSquared bandwith — true or false?
What would be the effect of a 1-hour, 1-day, or 1-week disruption in GPS be on your product? What is your backup system?
What will be the long-term consequences of the CBOC patent issue? [Note that while a story on this page give a short-term answer, long-term consequences of intellectual property concepts are far from settled. — Ed.]
Is there still room for a LightSquared type technology in the current broadband and spectrum governance environment?
What kind of disaster will be required to get the U.S. government off the dime on an uncorrelated-failure alternative PNT system?
Are commercial manufacturers considering offering more flexibility in their receiver designs (open-source GNSS). Open hardware is an interesting trend.
What’s next after GPS III?
Will the COMPASS system gain general acceptance in 2013-2014?
Tell us more about the future.
[That last was my favorite question, one after my own heart. For any other questions you may have, or any answers for that matter, or if you have even a clue, please write to me at [email protected]. I’m listening. — Ed.]
In this column, I normally write about satellites, signals, and space (as in outer), and the policies or controversies pertaining to those entities. This week we are headed indoors. Inner space, where GNSS has difficulties going, but must go, somehow, to prove itself commercially and governmentally. To do so, it needs powerful friends.
The most rigorous indoor location testing to date got underway two weeks ago in the San Francisco Bay Area, in trials organized by a Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) advisory committee, the Communications Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council (CSRIC). The tests seek to lay the groundwork for future FCC rulings on indoor location requirements, to which wireless carriers must adhere. The trials run through December 31, in dense urban, urban, suburban, and rural test blocks around the Bay.
For the sake of the GPS/GNSS industry and community, whatever technology solution emerges from these trials as the favorite, GPS/GNSS had better prove itself as a part of it, not only to gain a foothold in indoor markets and applications, but to preserve its standing in outdoor environments. Other positioning technologies have sprouted up like mushrooms, filling in vacant micro-niches. The indoor environment as a whole is just that, an environment, not a niche, and where it goes — taking the money with it — outdoor may likely follow. Wi-Fi, for example, is gaining installment base by leaps and bounds, and probably currently supplies the best unaided indoor location — where it is installed.
“Retailers are desperate for more customer data, this [indoor location data] is golden,” says Janice Partyka, GPS World’s contributing editor for wireless. “They probably won’t wait for the requirements or for the wireless carriers to push out the solution. Some venues like airports can track you now. This time around, commercial uses will precede E911.”
Although the need for accuracy is arguably greater indoors, so too are the difficulties — and the costs. At stake is getting room-level and floor-level location accuracy from a mobile 911 call to emergency responders during the Golden Hour, a term used in heart-attack, stroke, and trauma situations, but which applies equally to fires, violent crimes, and virtually by definition to any sort of emergency. Responders need to know “which side of the wall” he/she/it is on, and which floor — even before they enter the building.
In the floor-level or vertical component of the location coordinates resides one of the key challenges. The vertical or Z-coordinate in a GPS/GNSS solution has always had the lowest degree of accuracy. To be sure, the barriers imposed by steel, glass, and concrete, as well as the confusion generated by multipath in dense environments, apply just as much to the X- and Y-axes, but getting to Z (since getting from floor to floor in case a mistake is made would be most time-consuming) may constitute the largest challenge.
The FCC hosted a workshop in Washington D.C. on October 24 in preparation for the tests. The workshop introduced public-safety officials’ expectations for indoor coverage, test mechanics, the technologies under test, and more. CSRIC will draft a report for the FCC based on the test results by March 2013.
The Candidates, Please. Four companies are actively participating in the CSRIC tests, submitting their diverse indoor solutions for rigorous and repeatable performance proof: Boeing, NextNav, Polaris Wireless, and Qualcomm.
The CSRIC test bed discussions started in 2010 with seven potential technologies for Stage 1:
Polaris Wireless (RF fingerprinting)
Qualcomm (assisted-GPS/AFLT/cell ID)
NextNav (Wide-Area Positioning System (WAPS) of GPS-like terrestrial beacons, described here.)
Boeing (low-Earth orbit Iridium satellites; because much closer to Earth than GPS, hence 30-dB penetration margin; a range of Iridium solutions, some of them in combination with GPS
CSR (AGPS/WiFi/MEMS)
TruePosition (UTDOA)
CommScope (DAS proximity).
The latter three have since dropped out of the testing for reasons not stated.
Polaris Wireless is the only cellular-network-based location technology provider in the tests, as all other network-based location technology providers withdrew from participation in the CSRIC trials. The trial includes Polaris Wireless’ Wireless Location Signatures (WLS), a software-based radio-frequency (RF) pattern-matching approach that requires no changes to the wireless device or the wireless service provider’s base stations. The June issue of GPS World carried an article on this technology; see “Location by Database.”
Norman Shaw, Polaris Wireless executive director of government affairs and business development, serves as co-chairman of CSRIC’s efforts on improving indoor location technology. “RF does funny things. But there are cultural issues as well. It’s natural for us to expect technology to get us all the way to the goal line. However, we often overlook the challenges. Can we deliver Z-location? And can we do it in an actionable way for the emergency responder? That person needs to know, not that the emergency is 185 meters above the ground, but the number of the floor. For this and for other reasons, you need to marry different technologies.”
“This test is a great start,” Shaw concludes. “But this test bed will need to be maintained to continue testing and to test future technologies. Additionally, a second test bed will be needed in a denser, older city, probably East Coast; perhaps Chicago or New York. We should all be aware that once the testing concludes and the regulations appear, this is the emergency service we’re going to be living with for the next 20 years.”
Ganesh Pattabiraman, co-founder, president, and chief operating officer at NextNav, adds that in addition to providing data to drive regulation, the testing “brings awareness to the public safety operators and the FCC that here are reliable technologies that can address the problem of indoor location. As opposed to 10 years ago, or even six years ago. Not just ours, but others too.”
According to the NextNav website, “For devices equipped with NextNav’s technology, when a subscriber calls 911, the first responder won’t be left guessing about where they are. Providing a unique height capability, with vertical precision of up to 1 – 2 meters, first responders can move rapidly to the correct floor to ensure that not a second is wasted in the emergency response process. NextNav’s transmission is encrypted, secure and is available for carriers as a standalone service for E911 only. A carrier can implement the NextNav solution to enhance location performance of the E911 system separate from any decision to use NextNav capabilities as part of their commercial location-based services.”
Pattabiraman continues, “The need for accurate indoor location is greater [than for outdoor], but is the technology and the cost to the wireless carriers of implementing it up to the task? It all comes down to economics. If we or anyone can provide a solution that is incremental, reasonably priced, and commercially viable, then we can move forward.”
Particularly, he adds, “If we can build on the existing blocks of GPS at minor incremental cost, then we see the possibility of delivering the best possible accuracy for the lowest price.”
Test Administrator and Parameters. TechnoCom, a location-technology-neutral business, is conducting the Bay Area tests. TechnoCom is an active contributor to the Alliance for Telecommunications Solutions (ATIS) Emergency Services Interconnection Forum (ESIF). The ATIS conducts long-term research that serves as a basis for CSRIC findings and recommendations. The two organizations have many of the same members, although CSRIC consists of FCC-nominated members who serve one-year terms and thus doesn’t have “the consistency needed to do good science,” in one participant’s words.
The TechnoCom test parameters consist, broadly, of: a variety of locations (environments) and building types (also known as morphology), multiple test spots in each building, and each test spot to have at least 100 test calls. Researchers are looking for an indoor ground truth accuracy of 3 meters, something that would warm the hearts of public safety responders, but a level which, other experts say privately, is highly unlikely to be implemented as a requirement.
Public safety advocates would ideally want 5 meters, to the extent of “knowing which side of a wall a heart-attack victim is lying on.” Technology vendors such as those supplying solutions for test would probably settle for a 50-meter requirement, even if their solutions can do better. That’s at least in part because they are caught between the public safety folks on the one side and the wireless carriers — to whom they must sell — on the other. The wireless carriers are the most conservative of all, and may not want anything more stringent that the current outdoor requirements: 50-meter accuracy 67 percent of the time, and 150 meters 90 percent.
TechnoCom will test the following locations:
Dense urban: a four-block area north of Market Street in San Francisco’s financial district; as one participant pointed out, this is still not the densest urban environment to be found in the United States. For that, you have to look at older, Eastern cities such as New York or Chicago.
Urban: San Francisco and downtown San Jose
Suburban: Santa Clara County (malls, homes, condos and some high-rises)
Rural: Between Gilroy and Hollister, California.
All kinds of structures, about 20, typically found in the four basic environments, will serve as test spots: high-rise, mid-rise, mall, apartment building, house, warehouse, and barn. Various test points will be sited in each as appropriate, probably at 5-floor intervals in multi-storey buildings.
This is the next frontier for personal and machine navigation — and many are out there now, working diligently on it. In just one example, a new chip fuses input from several sensors, using the best combination at any given time to maximize coverage and accuracy while keeping power draw to a minimum. This produces continuous position availability in indoor environments, as demonstrated by performance measurements in real-world test environments.
The senior product manager responsible for this development joins us to talk about the inner workings and the outer manifestations of this new solution. He’ll be joined by other guest experts to be announced.
J. Blake Bullock was senior product manager responsible for CSR’s next generation of GNSS solutions. He has now transferred to Samsung System LSI Business and is responsible for GNSS and indoor positioning solutions. He holds a M.Sc. degree in geomatics engineering from the University of Calgary, an MBA from Arizona State University, and several patents in LBS and navigation.
