Mobility Induced Sensitivity of UAV based Nodes to Jamming in Private 5G Airfield Networks An Experimental Study

TL;DR

This experimental study investigates how UAV mobility affects signal quality, handover, and stability in private 5G networks under directional jamming attacks, revealing mobility-dependent vulnerabilities.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of UAV mobility impact on 5G link performance and jamming resilience in airfield environments through controlled experiments.

Findings

UAV mobility significantly affects link stability and signal degradation.

Higher speeds and altitudes increase vulnerability to jamming.

Mobility patterns influence handover performance and service stability.

Abstract

This work presents an experimental performance evaluation of a private 5G airfield network under controlled directional SDR jamming attacks targeting UAV-based UE nodes. Using a QualiPoc Android UE, mounted as a payload on a quadcopter UAV, we conducted a series of experiments to evaluate signal degradation, handover performance, and ser-vice stability in the presence of constant directional jamming. The conducted experiments aimed to examine the effects of varying travel speeds, altitudes, and moving patterns of a UAV-based UE to record and analyze the key physical-layer and network-layer metrics such as CQI, MCS, RSRP, SINR, BLER, Net PDSCH Throughput and RLF. The re-sults of this work describe the link stability and signal degradation dependencies, caused by the level of mobility of the UAV-based UE nodes during autonomous and automatic operation in private 5G Airfield networks