Many sectors, including transportation, telecommunications, finance and critical infrastructure, rely on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) like GPS for positioning, navigation and timing, but these signals are weak at the surface and vulnerable to jamming and spoofing. The study examined whether existing LEO communication satellites could help mitigate this vulnerability by supplementing or temporarily replacing GNSS in difficult environments.
The team focused on the Arctic, where GPS coverage and signal quality are often reduced, and used a ship sailing off the west coast of Greenland as a test platform. By exploiting Starlink and OneWeb downlink signals together with height information from the vessel, they were able to cut position errors from more than a kilometer in the absence of GPS to about 27 meters.
Being able to produce that level of accuracy in the Arctic suggests that safe, passive use of LEO communication signals for navigation could be extended to many regions on Earth. The approach relies on ground receivers listening to multiple satellites at once and applying signal-processing and estimation techniques to infer the receiver's location.
The research was led by Zak Kassas, TRC Endowed Chair in Intelligent Transportation Systems and professor of electrical and computer engineering at The Ohio State University. Kassas, who also directs Ohio State's Department of Transportation Center for Automated Vehicles Research with Multimodal AssurEd Navigation (CARMEN), said the lack of a robust operational backup when GPS is lost on aircraft or ships motivated the work.
"When you lose GPS on a plane or a ship there is no solution at the time being," said Kassas. "What we showed is that there are solutions ready to be deployed in the field with existing systems."
This Arctic campaign builds on earlier results from Kassas' ASPIN lab, which previously showed that Starlink signals alone could support positioning. The group has since demonstrated navigation using LEO satellites across the United States, including a stationary receiver in St. Louis, a ground vehicle in Pittsburgh, a high-altitude balloon near Albuquerque, and a ground vehicle and drone in Columbus, before extending their tests beyond the heartland.
For the Arctic experiment, the researchers exploited the different geometries of the two constellations: OneWeb has around 600 satellites in high-inclination orbits that cluster near the poles, while Starlink's more than 7,000 satellites provide dense coverage over lower and mid-latitudes. By selecting signals from whichever satellites were visible at a given time, they showed that the method can adapt to varying satellite availability without changes to the space segment.
Kassas emphasized that the team received no assistance from the operators SpaceX and Eutelsat and had no access to user traffic. The navigation solution used only publicly available information, such as downlink frequencies and approximate satellite locations, and treated the LEO broadcasts as signals of opportunity.
"We can be smart about what we have already in the environment and use it to navigate," said Kassas. "Ambient signals, whether they are terrestrial or non-terrestrial (such as LEO), are extremely useful for navigation if you know how to use them."
Because LEO satellites transmit stronger signals at the receiver than traditional GNSS satellites, interfering with them requires higher effort and power from an adversary. The study notes that more robust navigation could help lower the risk of serious incidents, including maritime collisions or aircraft losses, that some officials attribute to GPS disruption and cyber-related activity.
According to Kassas, deliberate interference with GPS has become a regular feature of electronic warfare and is now affecting civilian infrastructure as well as military operations. The authors argue that relying solely on future purpose-built systems would leave navigation exposed in the near term, whereas reusing existing LEO infrastructure can provide a faster route to resilience.
"Our approach is economical, alleviating the need to build and operate new dedicated navigation systems, and sustainable, preserving the scarce spectrum and our space environment, so we believe it will be integrated into future navigation systems," said Kassas. "We are showing that this dream can be a reality."
The findings point toward a hybrid navigation architecture in which GNSS, terrestrial beacons and LEO communication satellites all contribute to positioning and timing. Co-authors on the study include Will Barrett and Sharbel Kozhaya of Ohio State and David Marsh of The Wilson Center, reflecting links between technical navigation research and policy analysis on critical infrastructure security.
Research Report:Navigating the Arctic Circle with Starlink and OneWeb LEO Satellites
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