Disruptive Military Navigation Architectures

ABSTRACT: In the event that the GPS constellation was unavailable, none of the current back-up navigation and timing solutions in place today such as inertial navigation, geostationary augmentation systems or cellular positioning solutions would function, resulting in catastrophic effect on military and civil operations nationally and globally. To protect against this eventuality there is a need to develop a"Disruptive Navigation Architecture"that can provide the ability to rapidly reconstitute an equivalent capability in the event that GPS is not available. Under this SBIR effort we propose to design and demonstrate through prototyping and simulation an innovative Global Micro-Sat Positioning System (GMPS) to meet this need. We shall develop and identify the key functional performance parameters and system components needed to realize an alternate navigation solution in the absence of any GPS signals. The design for a GMPS Micro-Satellite will be developed based on existing Cubesat technology, to enable large numbers of microsats to be rapidly launched to reconstitute a global navigation and timing capability. The GMPS constellation coverage and geometry will be simulated in challenged environments and signal acquisition and tracking will be demonstrated using a Software Defined Radio (SDR) to show the expected GMPS PNT performance. BENEFIT: As both military and commercial operations have increasingly become reliant on GPS for position, navigation, and timing, the risk resulting from the loss of that capability has increased. Efforts to mitigate the effect of weak signals, jamming, and spoofing have been underway for some time, but the capability to address the complete loss of GPS remains a challenge due to the extreme cost of the existing GPS constellation and the logistics involved due to payload size and launch availability. It is anticipated that the cost effective and rapid replacement capabilities of the proposed technology will yield significant interest as a solution to the challenge of needing to rapidly deploy and reconstitute military GNSS.