Description of an interference test facility (ITF) to assess GNSS receivers performance in presence of interference

The E5 and E6 bands, which will be used by Galileo, will have to be shared with many ground-based applications in the aeronautical, communications and military domains. It becomes crucial to evaluate the effects of interference from terrestrial sources on the performance of GNSS Receivers. In order to solve this issue, the data recording in different locations (e.g. urban, rural and airport) in addition to the ability to replay and generate GNSS signals with identified interference may help the investigation of advanced interference mitigation techniques and the testing of their implementation in the receivers. The objective of this paper is to present the Interference Test Facility (ITF), a test-bed to assess GNSS receiver performance in presence of interference. This project aimed at developing an interference test facility to be used to generate (simulate or replay) interference and to assess the performance of the GNSS receivers when they have to face an intentional or non intentional interference. The paper introduces the hardware description of the ITF platform and its main functionalities. The paper addresses also a panorama of the potential interference signals in the GPS and Galileo bands and a test campaign that was performed to collect data representative of the interferences that may impact the GNSS receivers in various environments (urban, airport, etc.). This data collection was used further in the ITF project during the validation phase in order to demonstrate the capacity of the ITF platform to replay real interference signals. This validation consisted in demonstrating the equivalence of the impact of simulated and real interference.