GPS Spoofing Detection and Mitigation for Drones Using Distributed Radar Tracking and Fusion

In today’s world, Global positioning system (GPS)-based navigation is inexpensive for providing position, velocity, and time (PVT) information. GPS receivers are widely used on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and these targets are vulnerable to deliberate interference such as spoofing. In this paper, GPS spoofing detection and mitigation for UAVs are proposed using distributed radar ground stations equipped with a local tracker. In the proposed approach, UAVs and local trackers are linked to the fusion node. The UAVs estimate their position and covariance using the extended Kalman filter framework and send it to a fusion node as primary data. Simultaneously, the time-varying kinematics of the UAVs are estimated using the extended Kalman filter and global nearest neighbor association tracker frameworks, and this data is transmitted to the central fusion node as secondary data. A track-to-track association is proposed to detect spoofing attacks using available primary and secondary data. After detecting the spoofing attack, the secondary data is subjected to a correlation-free fusion. We propose using this fused state as a control input to the UAVs to mitigate the spoofing attack. The spoofing scenario results show that using the predicted fusion state provides the same accuracy as a GPS receiver in a clean environment. Furthermore, because the innovation is calculated using the predicted fused state, there is no effect on the number of satellite signals on PRMSE. Additionally, in terms of PRMSE, radars with low measurement noise outperform radars with high measurement noise. The proposed algorithm is best suited for use in drone swarm applications.