Location Verification in Next-Generation Non-Terrestrial Networks

Reliable location awareness is essential for the development of new services and applications in non-terrestrial networks (NTNs). The ability of malicious users to report false location information poses a significant threat to the performance of NTNs. This threat introduces the need for a flexible and robust location verification system (LVS) that can reliably detect malicious users. This paper proposes a single-satellite LVS based on round-trip time and angle-of-arrival measurements. We characterize several sources of uncertainty unique to NTNs and examine their combined effect on positioning error. Using this model, we approximate a likelihood function for the unknown user position and propose a likelihood ratio decision rule for location verification. Results display receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves to evaluate the LVS performance when a malicious user is located at various distances from its reported location. When compared with two other baseline LVSs, the proposed system is shown to significantly improve area under the ROC curve performance.