Detection and Classification of Interference in Mobile Communication Systems

Abstract: The usage of wireless technology has in the past decade vastly increased and it continues to do so as well. Because of this, we become more and more reliant on this considerably fragile technology. Wireless technology, which uses radio waves to transmit data from one point to another can easily be interfered by radio jammers. This thesis work is about the detection and classification of the interference that is produced by jammers over the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) air interface. A typical GSM jammer that can be found on the Internet is analyzed but also more advanced GSM jammers are analyzed. The GSM standard is analyzed to find vulnerabilities that a jammer can take advantage of. The result is an interference detector that can be used to detect and classify interference over the GSM networks. The detector is constructed with an Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) but is also portable to other software-defined radio (SDR) platforms.