GNSS Jamming Mitigation with a Pilot Signal Aided Deep Integration Framework

Kana Nagai, Samer Khanafseh, Boris Pervan

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	This paper investigates whether tracking GNSS pilot signals using ultra-tight (deep) coupling with inertial sensors can significantly improve GNSS robustness under severe wideband jamming. Because GNSS pilot signals do not contain navigation-bit transitions, they enable longer coherent integration intervals. Increasing the coherent integration time averages down measurement noise and increases the effective signal-to-noise ratio, yielding more reliable measurements under low carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N0) conditions. Ultra-tight coupling fuses correlator I/Q measurements with inertial data through an extended Kalman filter, reducing carrier-phase estimation error to enable the longer averaging intervals. However, simulations indicate that increasing the integration time reduces measurement noise while simultaneously increasing the accumulation of process noise due to inertial sensor random-walk errors. When this accumulated process noise exceeds a critical threshold, the receiver is unable to maintain lock, resulting in cycle slips. Thus, tracking robustness is ultimately constrained more by process-noise accumulation than by measurement-noise reduction, implying that longer coherent integration times do not necessarily improve robustness, but that selecting inertial sensors with low random walk error characteristics can.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2026 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 26 - 29, 2026 Hyatt Regency Orange County Anaheim, California
Pages:	359 - 371
Cite this article:	Nagai, Kana, Khanafseh, Samer, Pervan, Boris, "GNSS Jamming Mitigation with a Pilot Signal Aided Deep Integration Framework," Proceedings of the 2026 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, Anaheim, California, January 2026, pp. 359-371. https://doi.org/10.33012/2026.20544
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