Seminars

Abstract:  There is a pressing need for assured positioning, navigation, and timing (A-PNT): systems less vulnerable to jamming and spoofing than traditional GNSS. Fused LEO GNSS exploits massive commercial investment in broadband Internet satellite hardware to address this need. The new and upcoming constellations by SpaceX, Amazon, and OneWeb will soon comprise tens of thousands of space vehicles (SVs), each of which can be adapted to provide PNT service: a much nearer, much louder signal that (in effect) relays and improves the positioning capability of GPS from low Earth orbit, where GPS is more difficult to jam or spoof. Rather than add dedicated clocks, radios, antennas, and spectrum as in prior proposals, we ``fuse'' these with existing satellite resources. SVs will estimate their orbits and stabilize their inexpensive (non-atomic) clocks using GPS, and will provide up-to-the-second orbit and clock ephemerides to the user. Rather than continuous ranging signals on special-purpose spectrum, service will consist of discrete data bursts on (Ku-band) broadband channels. And rather than hemispheric coverage, each SV will provide GNSS signals only to a small "spot beam'' region at a time.

Our work addresses the challenges and opportunities posed by these differences from traditional GNSS and prior proposals, establishing the viability and modest cost of the fused LEO GNSS proposal [1] and its potential for sub-meter accuracy [2].

[1] P.A. Iannucci and T.E. Humphreys. Fused Low-Earth-Orbit GNSS. Submitted for review. IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, expected 2021.

https://radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/datastore/fusedLEOGNSS/conops/paper.pdf

[2] P.A. Iannucci and T.E. Humphreys. Economical fused LEO GNSS. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ION PLANSx Meeting, 2020.

https://radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/images/stories/files/papers/iannucci2020fused.pdf

Bio: Peter Iannucci earned his B.S. from MIT in 2011, with majors in EECS and Physics. In 2019, he completed his Ph.D. in Networks and Mobile Systems at MIT CSAIL with Hari Balakrishnan. Iannucci's doctoral thesis, "Wireless Communication and Localization Systems under Spatial and Temporal Channel Variations", combined his work on link-layer protocols for rateless codes, acoustic "room-area networks", and fundamental limits on the privacy of participants in a MIMO-OFDM network. In March of 2019, Peter joined Todd Humphreys as a postdoctoral research fellow.  Peter's current research interests include collaborative navigation, multi-spectral mapping, and re-purposing broadband Internet satellites for radionavigation.  He is entering the academic job market this fall.