Insights into jammer mitigation via space-time adaptive processing

In recent years, the military and civilian populations have become increasingly reliant upon the Global Positioning System (GPS) for knowledge of geographical location and timing information for synchronous operations, asset deployment, and communications. GPS receivers have been shown to operate with accuracy in benign environments and enjoy a wide variety of modern day applications. The high level of military and civilian dependence upon GPS makes it a likely electronic warfare (EW) target. This effort concerns the mitigation of a particular type of EW known as jamming. Jamming is the direction of electromagnetic energy towards a GPS receiver that causes degraded GPS signal reception and navigational performance. The focus of this work is on a particular jamming mitigation technique known as space-time adaptive processing (STAP). STAP is a signal processing method which combines data from multiple antenna elements to mitigate jamming while concurrently facilitating the reception of GPS signals.