GenAI for Energy-Efficient and Interference-Aware Compressed Sensing of GNSS Signals on a Google Edge TPU

Thorben Wegner, Lucas Heublein, Tobias Feigl, Felix Ott, Christopher Mutschler, and Alexander Rügamer

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	Traditional methods for classifying global navigation satellite system (GNSS) jamming signals typically involve postprocessing raw or spectral data streams, requiring complex and costly data transmission to cloud-based interference classification systems. In contrast, our proposed approach efficiently compresses GNSS data streams directly at the hardware receiver while simultaneously classifying jamming and spoofing attacks in real time. Given the growing prevalence of GNSS jamming, there is a critical need for real-time solutions suitable for power-constrained environments. This paper introduces a novel method for compressing and classifying GNSS jamming threats using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), specifically variational autoencoders (VAEs), deployed on Google Edge tensor processing units (TPUs). The study evaluates various autoencoder (AE) architectures to compress and reconstruct GNSS signals, focusing on preserving interference characteristics while minimizing data size near the receiver hardware. The pipeline adapts largescale AE models for Google Edge TPUs through 8-bit quantization to ensure energy-efficient deployment. Tests on raw in-phase and quadrature-phase (IQ) data, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) data, and handcrafted features show the system achieves significant compression (> 42×) and accurate classification of approximately 72 interference types on reconstructed signals (F2-score 0.915), closely matching the original signals (F2-score 0.923). The hardware-centric GenAI approach also substantially reduces jammer signal transmission costs, offering a practical solution for interference mitigation. Ablation studies on conditional and factorized VAEs (i.e., FactorVAE) explore latent feature disentanglement for data generation, enhancing model interpretability and fostering trust in machine learning (ML) solutions for sensitive interference applications. Index Terms—Compression, Disentanglement, Generative AI, GNSS, Interference Detection, Classification, Jamming, Edge Computing, Energy-efficient, Latent Variables, Embeddings
Published in:	2025 IEEE/ION Position, Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS) April 28 - 1, 2025 Salt Lake Marriott Downtown at City Creek Salt Lake City, UT
Pages:	1149 - 1160
Cite this article:	Wegner, Thorben, Heublein, Lucas, Feigl, Tobias, Ott, Felix, Mutschler, Christopher, Rügamer, Alexander, "GenAI for Energy-Efficient and Interference-Aware Compressed Sensing of GNSS Signals on a Google Edge TPU," 2025 IEEE/ION Position, Location and Navigation Symposium (PLANS), Salt Lake City, UT, April 2025, pp. 1149-1160.
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