David Contreras Franco

Mr. David Contreras Franco

Fraunhofer IIS
+1
orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

5Years (2022-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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25 March 2023 in Sensors
Verified
Journal Article
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JMJohannes Rossouw van der Merwe
Johannes Rossouw van der Merwe
DFDavid Contreras Franco
David Contreras Franco
Jonathan HansenJonathan Hansen
Jonathan Hansen
TBTobias Brieger
Tobias Brieger
Tobias FeiglTobias Feigl
Tobias Feigl
WFWolfgang Felber
Wolfgang Felber
Interference signals cause position errors and outages to global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers. However, to solve these problems, the interference source must be detected, classified, its purpose determined, and localized to eliminate it. Several interference monitoring solutions exist, but these are expensive, resulting in fewer nodes that may miss spatially sparse interference signals. This article introduces a low-cost commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) GNSS interference monitoring, detection, and classification receiver. It employs machine learning (ML) on tailored signal pre-processing of the raw signal samples and GNSS measurements to facilitate a generalized, high-performance architecture that does not require human-in-the-loop (HIL) calibration. Therefore, the low-cost receivers with high performance can justify significantly more receivers being deployed, resulting in a significantly higher probability of intercept (POI). The architecture of the monitoring system is described in detail in this article, including an analysis of the energy consumption and optimization. Controlled interference scenarios demonstrate detection and classification capabilities exceeding conventional approaches. The ML results show that accurate and reliable detection and classification are possible with COTS hardware.

2 January 2024 in IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
JMJohannes Rossouw van der Merwe
Johannes Rossouw van der Merwe
DFDavid Contreras Franco
David Contreras Franco
Tobias FeiglTobias Feigl
Tobias Feigl
ARAlexander Rügamer
Alexander Rügamer
Interference signals degrade the performance of a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver. Classification of these interference signals allow better situational awareness and facilitate appropriate counter-measures. However, classification is challenging and processing-intensive, especially in severe multipath environments. This article proposes a low-resource interference classification approach that combines conventional statistical signal processing approaches with machine learning (ML). It leverages the processing efficiency of conventional statistical signal processing by summarizing, e.g., a short-time Fourier transform (STFT), with statistical measures. Furthermore, the ML design space is bounded as the signal is pre-processed. It results in fewer opportunities for ML but facilitates faster convergence and the use of simpler architectures. Therefore, this approach has lower ML training complexity and lower processing and memory requirements. Results show competitive classification capabilities to more complex approaches. It demonstrates that more efficient architectures can be developed using existing signal-processing approaches

16 January 2022 in Sensors
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Journal Article
Open access
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JMJohannes Rossouw van der Merwe
Johannes Rossouw van der Merwe
FGFabio Garzia
Fabio Garzia
ARAlexander Rügamer
Alexander Rügamer
SUSantiago Urquijo
Santiago Urquijo
DFDavid Contreras Franco
David Contreras Franco
WFWolfgang Felber
Wolfgang Felber
The performance of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers is significantly affected by interference signals. For this reason, several research groups have proposed methods to mitigate the effect of different kinds of jammers. One effective method for wide-band interference mitigation (IM) is the high-rate DFT-based data manipulator (HDDM) pulse blanker (PB). It provides good performance to pulsed and frequency sparse interference. However, it and many other methods have poor performance against wide-band noise signals, which are not frequency-sparse. This article proposes to include automatic gain control (AGC) in the HDDM structure to attenuate the signal instead of removing it: the HDDM-AGC. It overcomes the wide-band noise limitation for IM at the cost of limiting mitigation capability to other signals. Previous studies with this approach were limited to only measuring the carrier-to-noise density ratio (C/N0) performance of tracking, but this article extends the analysis to include the impact of the HDDM-AGC algorithm on the position, velocity, and time (PVT) solution. It allows an end-to-end evaluation and impact assessment of mitigation to a GNSS receiver. This study compares two commercial receivers: one high-end and one low-cost, with and without HDDM IM against laboratory-generated interference signals. The results show that the HDDM-AGC provides a PVT availability and precision comparable to high-end commercial receivers with integrated mitigation for most interference types. For pulse interferences, its performance is superior. Further, it is shown that degradation is minimized against wide-band noise interferences. Regarding low-cost receivers, the PVT availability can be increased up to 40% by applying an external HDDM-AGC.

14 May 2025 in Engineering Proceedings
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Conference Paper
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SKSimon Kocher
Simon Kocher
DFDavid Contreras Franco
David Contreras Franco
ADAntonia Dietz
Antonia Dietz
ARAlexander Rügamer
Alexander Rügamer
Interference signals can disrupt global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers and degrade or deny a position-velocity-time (PVT) solution. After detecting an interference signal, classifying its type can provide insight into its cause and help determine the necessary next steps to counteract it. In this paper, we present a method for interference detection and a resource-efficient model-aided on-the-edge machine learning (ML) model for interference signal classification running on low-cost commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, enabling a highly cost-effective spectral monitoring solution. The choice of detection metrics is justified based on real-world spectral monitoring data from a German highway and the capability of the ML model to generalize across different environments is demonstrated in an outdoor field test. Overall, we present an operationally ready GNSS interference detection and classification system.