Impact of Electromagnetic Interference From Consumer Electronics and Bluetooth Crowding on GNSS-Based Performance in Mobile Devices

This article explores the impact of electromagnetic interference from consumer electronics and common household appliance on the performance of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers in smartphones. As GNSS signals are weak and susceptible to external noise and interference, consumer appliances can introduce spurious emissions within GNSS frequency bands, leading to signal degradation. To investigate this, we conducted a series of controlled experiments simulating typical smartphone usage in proximity to different sources of EMI among household appliances (i.e., a microwave oven) and consumer electronics (i.e., Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices), ultimately focusing on a dense Bluetooth environment. Our analysis reveals that the microwave oven can induce severe GNSS signal degradation, with substantial automatic gain control and C/N-0 drops (up to 2.3 dB-Hz) and significant satellite availability loss (up to 18 %), particularly in close-range configurations, leading to positioning root-mean-square error (RMSE) increases exceeding 7 m. In addition, Wi-Fi interference resulted in moderate reductions in signal quality, with positioning RMSE increases of less than 2m in most scenarios. In contrast, Bluetooth exhibited negligible effects under tested conditions. These findings suggest potential implications for indoor navigation applications and underscore the importance of further improvements in interference mitigation for consumer GNSS devices.