The global PNT ecosystem has been a target of screw-ups. Private companies and government agencies are joining forces to work out a solution
Spirent joins ESA: Spirent has joined the European Space Agency in supporting the U.K. government’s Resilient PNT Strategy.
The agreement: Spirent will lend its PNT Resiliency Health Check, along with its PNT Alliance, and PNT Shopfront, to encourage collaboration across various sectors.
Raising awareness: The goal of the program is to ensure that operators and suppliers of the Critical National Infrastructure are aware of the PNT risk and mitigation options.
The push for a resilient positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) ecosystem is gaining momentum across the world, as PNT continues to deliver critical infrastructure for public and private operations. Spirent — supplier of PNT testing and simulation solutions — recently entered a three-year partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA) to deepen efforts in the U.K.
The initiative focuses on establishing test frameworks and best practices for U.K. operators, providers and suppliers for evaluating PNT systems supporting Critical National Infrastructure (CNI).
The goal of the program is to support the UK government in its Resilient PNT Strategy. To that end, it seeks to spread awareness and make available next-generation PNT test and assessment capabilities, essential for validating and rating PNT equipment and systems, to improve attack readiness.
Spirent’s VP of engineering and product development, Mark Holbrow said in a statement, “for years, organizations have been wrestling with a fundamental challenge: they know PNT resilience matters, but they do not have a clear way to measure it or benchmark their progress. This new initiative changes that by building the tools and frameworks that let critical national infrastructure operators quantify resilience, track it, and improve it over time”.
The U.K. has a history of relying almost entirely on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and US GPS (Global Positioning System) as PNT sources. In the recent years, the government has made a heavier push for PNT autonomy with initiatives that include a dedicated national PNT office, work with Viasat to develop its own Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS) for improved GPS data accuracy, and crisis plans for GPS outage scenarios.
The current initiative will include: the Spirent PNT Alliance — an industry body that will include working groups like the Royal Institute of Navigation (RIN), research partners, and government institutes; the Spirent PNT Shopfront, a platform that brings industry and academic leaders together to develop and demo resiliency services for CNI owners and operators; and the Spirent PNT Resiliency Health Check, a tool for self-evaluating equipment and maintaining compliance.
The reliance on PNT systems as a source of real-time information in critical infrastructure and national security is a global phenomenon. Unwittingly, industries so far have relied on consuming services from unprotected user equipment which have opened doors for malicious interferences.
A disciplined architecture, best practices, and standard frameworks, coupled with readily available toolsets help immunize the ecosystem against jamming and spoofing events, ensure compliance, and achieve better levels of performance and precision.