From ICAO GNSS Interference Mask to Jamming Protection Area For Safe Civil Aviation Operation

Jamming situations taking place as part of anti-drone struggle or military exercises are a threat for civil aviation. During these jamming operations, in order to protect civil aviation operations, segregation zones (also called protection zone in this article) are elaborated in which GNSS ICAO minimum requirements are not guaranteed. Segregation zones refer to the area, determined by the regulator, in which pilots are warned of a potential GNSS service failure because of the jamming. Currently, these protection areas are deduced from the ITU standardized interference mask but it appears that these protection areas are much larger than the observed impacted zone, highlighting thus the inefficiency of the current method. In this article, first a clarification on the interpretation of the interference mask is proposed, in order to explain the difference between the size of the protection zone and the impacted area. Second, a new method is proposed to compute a new protection zone, and this method estimates the true impacted zone considering local RFI situation. The main innovation of this new method is to take into account the situation of the jammer in terms of aeronautical interference level in its local surroundings. The main advantage of this method is the protection area size reduction while still guaranteeing that minimum GNSS ICAO requirements are respected.