An experimental study on jamming tolerance of 3G/WCDMA

The use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies in military environment is attractive, but in tactical communications, one of the biggest challenges is the jamming/interference tolerance of the deployed systems. Interference tolerance is important also in public authority and in some special civilian wireless network set-ups. We present an experimental measurement-based study on jamming tolerance of wireless third generation (3G) / Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) links in controlled laboratory environment. The performance is evaluated in cross-layer oriented fashion in order to find out how physical layer (PHY) interference affects the system performance at higher layers. We study the effect of PHY radio frequency jamming with wideband noise and also test more sophisticated link layer jamming, where selected WCDMA channels are jammed individually. The results show that, in general, COTS WCDMA is robust against jamming. Especially an ongoing circuit switched (CS) call tolerates high interference levels. Additional findings are also reported related to the network attachment procedure, Short Message Service (SMS) and effectiveness of link layer jamming.