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GNSS Spoofing and Jamming Detection and Mitigation in Smart City Architecture
Subject area: Science,Engineering and Technology · Area of research: Cybersecurity in Space Technology
Abstract
Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have become an invisible utility underpinning nearly every subsystem of the modern smart city, from adaptive traffic control and autonomous vehicles to smart-grid timing, 5G/6G synchronization, and emergency dispatch. Because civil GNSS signals are transmitted at very low power over publicly documented formats, they are structurally vulnerable to jamming, which denies service through radio-frequency noise, and spoofing, which deceives receivers with counterfeit signals that appear authentic. This paper examines the role of GNSS within smart city architecture, surveys the jamming and spoofing threat landscape, and reviews current detection techniques spanning signal-level monitoring, cryptographic authentication, spatial antenna-array processing, and data-driven machine learning approaches. It then reviews mitigation strategies, including controlled reception pattern antennas, navigation message authentication, sensor fusion, and crowdsourced interference monitoring, before proposing a six-layer secure detection and mitigation architecture tailored to the distributed, multi-stakeholder nature of smart cities. The paper concludes by identifying open research gaps, including adversarial machine learning, urban-canyon testing deficits, cross-jurisdictional governance, and the cost of hardened receiver hardware at municipal scale.
Keywords
GNSS, GPS spoofing, jamming, smart city, positioning navigation and timing, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure
How to cite this paper
@article{1722902,
author = {Zulaihat Mukhtar, Jennifer Nanko Sambo, Rekiya Sule, Bulus Kefas, Saeed Baba Ahmad; Aisha Yakubu},
title = {GNSS Spoofing and Jamming Detection and Mitigation in Smart City Architecture},
journal = {Iconic Research And Engineering Journals},
year = {2026},
volume = {10},
number = {3},
pages = {387-396},
issn = {2456-8880},
url = {https://www.irejournals.com/formatedpaper/1722902.pdf},
abstract = {Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have become an invisible utility underpinning nearly every subsystem of the modern smart city, from adaptive traffic control and autonomous vehicles to smart-grid timing, 5G/6G synchronization, and emergency dispatch. Because civil GNSS signals are transmitted at very low power over publicly documented formats, they are structurally vulnerable to jamming, which denies service through radio-frequency noise, and spoofing, which deceives receivers with counterfeit signals that appear authentic.
This paper examines the role of GNSS within smart city architecture, surveys the jamming and spoofing threat landscape, and reviews current detection techniques spanning signal-level monitoring, cryptographic authentication, spatial antenna-array processing, and data-driven machine learning approaches. It then reviews mitigation strategies, including controlled reception pattern antennas, navigation message authentication, sensor fusion, and crowdsourced interference monitoring, before proposing a six-layer secure detection and mitigation architecture tailored to the distributed, multi-stakeholder nature of smart cities.
The paper concludes by identifying open research gaps, including adversarial machine learning, urban-canyon testing deficits, cross-jurisdictional governance, and the cost of hardened receiver hardware at municipal scale.},
keywords = {GNSS, GPS spoofing, jamming, smart city, positioning navigation and timing, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure},
month = {September},
}