Performance Analysis of a Mission-Critical Portable LTE System in Targeted RF Interference

Abstract

Mission-critical wireless networks are being upgraded to 4G long-term evolution (LTE). As opposed to capacity, these networks require very high reliability and security as well as easy deployment and operation in the field. Wireless communication systems have been vulnerable to jamming, spoofing and other radio frequency attacks since the early days of analog systems. Although wireless systems have evolved, important security and reliability concerns still exist. This paper presents our methodology and results for testing 4G LTE operating in harsh signaling environments. We use software-defined radio technology and open-source software to develop a fully configurable protocol-aware interference waveform. We define several test cases that target the entire LTE signal or part of it to evaluate the performance of a missioncritical production LTE system. Our experimental results show that synchronization signal interference in LTE causes significant throughput degradation at low interference power. By dynamically evaluating the performance measurement counters, the knearest neighbor classification method can detect the specific RF signaling attack to aid in effective mitigation.

Analysis of Non-Pilot Interference on Link Adaptation and Latency in Cellular Networks

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LTE PHY layer vulnerability analysis and testing using open-source SDR tools

“…Although we present the tools and metrics for LTE, rather than in an abstract way, the concepts are applicable for other wireless protocols as well. The software tools have been presented in [13] and are included here for completeness.…”

On Performance Improvement of Centroid Topology Optimization Schemes in LTE Networks

“…To improve network performance wireless network such as LTE networks that provide broadband wireless communication for high speed data transmission, connecting heterogeneous local-area networks, and supporting numerous IoT-based smart-world applications (smart grid, smart home, smart manufacturing, smart cities), mission critical service (e.g., public safety) and others [24,25,30,31,40,47,48,50,53,55], a number of research efforts have been conducted [6-8, 10, 12-19, 21-23, 26, 29, 31, 34, 35, 37-39, 41-46, 51, 56-58]. These efforts can be generally divided into categories, including topology optimization, power management, and relay deployment, among and others (crosslayer design, economic-driven approach, experimentaldriven performance assessment, security, etc.…”