Comparison of Direct and Localization-based Methods for Position Verification using Distance Measurement

Position verification is a technique used to check the validity of a position report sent from a mobile station (MS) to a base station (BS), with the aim of detecting anomalies and spoofing. In this study, two different methods were compared when each BS measures the MS-BS distance for position verification. One method is a direct method; the difference between the measured distance and the distance to the reported position is used to calculate a test statistic. Another method is a localization-based method; the MS position is firstly estimated, then the difference between the estimated and reported positions is used to calculate a test statistic. The comparison was made theoretically and numerically in terms of the test statistics and anomaly detection performance. The numerical simulation considered the civil aviation system called the automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B). As a result, the localization-based method showed a slightly better performance than the direct method.