Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing (APNT)

u-blox APNT: resilience and efficiency

u-blox is trusted for delivering globally available state-of-the-art GNSS solutions, enabling reliable, high-quality, and scalable positioning across a wide range of industries through efficient, easy-to-integrate products. While high-end APNT systems offer strong resilience in challenging environments, they often come with significant integration complexity, cost, and limited scalability, making them impractical for widespread deployment.

As interference and spoofing become more prevalent, the industry requires a new approach that combines resilience with efficiency and scalability.

Built on a trusted single-chip architecture, the u-blox ZED-R20P delivers on this requirement, providing robust performance against jamming and spoofing while maintaining the power efficiency, integration simplicity, and scalability that define u-blox solutions.

NavPRISM: Signal-Level Resilience Against Jamming and Spoofing

At the core of this capability is u-blox NavPRISM (Positioning Resilience and Interference Mitigation), a dedicated signal-level engine designed to ensure GNSS positioning remains robust and reliable under RF interference.

NavPRISM focuses specifically on protecting GNSS signals from disruption and deception, enabling systems to maintain positioning even in contested environments.

Resilient to jamming and spoofing threats

Modern operational environments are increasingly affected by multi-band jamming and spoofing attacks, making reliable GNSS positioning more challenging.

With NavPRISM, ZED-R20P delivers:

• Resilience to multi-band jamming and spoofing attacks
• Detection and mitigation of signal interference
• Continued operation in contested and degraded RF conditions 

Ensuring positioning remains available even in the presence of active interference.

Preventing false positioning under advanced spoofing

In defense and mission-critical applications, the greatest risk is not signal loss, but deceptive positioning.

NavPRISM is designed to:

• Detect and mitigate advanced spoofing attempts
• Prevent false positioning caused by manipulated signals
• Ensure only consistent and credible signals contribute to navigation 

Ensuring systems are not misled by plausible but incorrect positioning data.

Enhanced with Galileo OSNMA authentication

NavPRISM integrates Galileo OSNMA to further strengthen signal trust:

• Authentication of navigation messages at the signal level
• Additional protection against spoofed signals 

Reinforcing confidence in GNSS signals from space.

Adaptive interference mitigation

Not all interference scenarios are the same, effective mitigation requires adaptability.

NavPRISM dynamically:

• Adjusts tracking strategies under interference
• Prioritizes clean and reliable signals
• Maintains performance across varying interference conditions 

Ensuring consistent operation without manual intervention.

Maximizing signal availability in challenged environments

Modern GNSS performance depends on maintaining access to usable signals, even under degraded conditions.

NavPRISM enhances signal availability through:

• All-band, all-constellation GNSS reception
• Improved robustness in partial signal blockage scenarios
• Enhanced tracking in low-SNR environments 

Ensuring reliable positioning even when signal conditions are suboptimal.

System Security: Protecting Data, Interfaces, and Device Integrity

While NavPRISM ensures signal resilience, trusted positioning also requires protection across the entire system.

The ZED-R20P platform extends security beyond the RF domain through a security-by-design architecture, ensuring that positioning data remains authentic, secure, and protected from tampering.

Securing receiver-to-host communication

• Authentication and encryption of GNSS data interfaces
• Protection against man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks
• Secure transfer of navigation and timing data 

Ensuring trusted data remains secure across system boundaries.

Protecting GNSS data against tampering and injection

• Protection against data manipulation and injection attacks
• Verification of message authenticity and integrity
• Detection of replayed or altered GNSS data 

Ensuring only valid and unaltered data is used by the system.

Ensuring device integrity

• Secure boot to verify firmware authenticity
• Configuration lock to prevent unauthorized changes 

Protecting the receiver from compromise and misconfiguration.

Preventing unauthorized access

• Protection of debug interfaces (e.g., JTAG)
• Prevention of unauthorized access to system functions and sensitive data 

Ensuring device-level security even in exposed environments.

Suitable markets 

u-blox brings APNT capabilities to scalable, real-world systems through its R20 platform, combining resilient GNSS reception, signal threat awareness, authentication, and continuity mechanisms.

These capabilities are designed for applications where positioning must remain reliable under disruption, while meeting the constraints of quality, power, integration, and large-scale deployment. As a result, APNT is becoming essential across a range of markets where positioning failure is no longer acceptable.

Drones and UAS

Drones and UAS represent one of the most demanding and rapidly evolving environments for APNT. These systems depend heavily on positioning data, often operate in RF-challenged or contested conditions, and must meet strict constraints on size, weight, power, and quality while supporting scalable deployment across fleets and platform variants.

In many of these systems, positioning failure directly leads to mission failure.

As drone applications mature, positioning is no longer just a performance parameter. It is increasingly tied to trust, regulation, and operational safety. Key capabilities are becoming part of the system requirement rather than optional features:

• Resilience to interference and degraded signal conditions
• Jamming and spoofing detection and mitigation
• Trusted identification and geofencing
• Multi-sensor situational awareness and data fusion
• Security-by-design with trusted components

This creates a new design challenge. System developers must balance multiple factors while adapting to different mission profiles:

• Resilience and continuity under disruption
• Positioning accuracy and integrity
• Integration effort and system complexity
• Quality, size, and power constraints
• Scalability across fleets and deployment volumes

Within the drone ecosystem, requirements vary significantly across platforms. From small UAS where efficiency and quality are critical, to high-speed interceptor drones operating in dynamic conditions, to advanced autonomous systems with higher demands on integrity and system awareness. This diversity makes drones an important driver for scalable APNT solutions.

Defence and security

Defence and security represent one of several environments where positioning reliability is critical, alongside drones, autonomy, and critical infrastructure. Jamming, spoofing, and intentional interference are part of the operational landscape, and positioning systems must be designed to function under these conditions.

In many of these scenarios, positioning failure directly impacts mission execution. Systems must be able to maintain reliable navigation and timing while detecting, resisting, and responding to signal threats in real time.

Key requirements for defence and security applications include:

• Robust jamming and spoofing detection and mitigation
• Continuous operation in contested and degraded environments
• Trusted positioning and timing data with high integrity
• Secure architectures that protect against manipulation and unauthorized access
• Interoperability across systems and coordination between platforms 

This creates a fundamentally different design paradigm. Systems cannot rely on signal availability and must instead be built for resilience under disruption.

APNT provides the foundation for this approach. By combining signal awareness, authentication, continuity mechanisms, and secure system design, it enables defense and security systems to maintain mission continuity in environments where reliability cannot be assumed.

Looking ahead

APNT represents both a technology and a deployment challenge. Positioning systems need to combine resilience with scalability to operate reliably across real-world environments.

u-blox is enabling this transition through its R20 platform.

Frequently asked questions