How Online Mapmakers Are Helping the Red Cross Save Lives in the Philippines

Hundres of destroyed homes are visible in this aerial photograph
from the Samar province of The Philippines.

As reported by the Atlantic: It will be months before we know the true damage brought about by super typhoon Haiyan. The largest death tolls now associated with the storm are only estimates. Aid workers from across the world are now flying to the island nation, or they just recently arrived there. They—and Filipinos—will support survivors and start to rebuild.

But they will be helped by an incredible piece of technology, a worldwide, crowd-sourced humanitarian collaboration made possible by the Internet.

What is it? It’s a highly detailed map of the areas affected by super typhoon Haiyan, and it mostly didn't exist three days ago, when the storm made landfall.

Since Saturday, more than 400 volunteers have made nearly three quarters of a million additions to a free, online map of areas in and around the Philippines. Those additions reflect the land before the storm, but they will help Red Cross workers and volunteers make critical decisions after it about where to send food, water, and supplies.

These things are easy to hyperbolize, but in the Philippines, now, it is highly likely that free mapping data and software—and the community that support them—will save lives.

The Wikipedia of maps
 

The changes were made to OpenStreetMap (OSM), a sort of Wikipedia of maps. OSM aims to be a complete map of the world, free to use and editable by all. Created in 2004, it now has over a million users.

I spoke to Dale Kunce, senior geospatial engineer at the American Red Cross, about how volunteer mapping helps improve the situation in the Philippines.

The Red Cross, internationally, recently began to use open source software and data in all of its projects, he said. Free software reduces or eliminates project “leave behind” costs, or the amount of money required to keep something running after the Red Cross leaves. Any software or data compiled by the Red Cross are now released under an open-source or share-alike license.

While Open Street Map has been used in humanitarian crises before, the super typhoon Haiyan is the first time the Red Cross has coordinated its use and the volunteer effort around it.

How the changes were made

The 410 volunteers who have edited OSM in the past three days aren't all mapmaking professionals. Organized by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team on Twitter, calls went out for the areas of the Philippines in the path of the storm to be mapped.

What does that mapping look like? Mostly, it involves “tracing” roads into OSM using satellite data. The OSM has a friendly editor which underlays satellite imagery—on which infrastructure like roads are clearly visible—beneath the image of the world as captured by OSM. Volunteers can then trace the path of a road, as they do in this GIF, created by the D.C.-based start-up, Mapbox:

Volunteers can also trace buildings in Mapbox using the same visual editor. Since Haiyan made landfall, volunteers have traced some 30,000 buildings.

Maps, on the ground 

How does that mapping data help workers on the ground in the Philippines? First, it lets workers there print paper maps using OSM data which can be distributed to workers in the field. The American Red Cross has dispatched four of its staff members to the Philippines, and one of them—Helen Welch, an information management specialist—brought with her more than 50 paper maps depicting the city of Tacloban and other badly hit areas.

The red line shows the path of super typhoon Haiyan and the colored patches
show where volunteers made additions to OpenStreetMap this weekend.  Notice
the extent of the edits in Tacloban, a city of more than 220,000 that bore the brunt
of the storm. (American Red Cross)

Those maps were printed out on Saturday, before volunteers made most of the changes to the affected area in OSM. When those, newer data are printed out on the ground, they will include almost all of the traced buildings, and rescuers will have a better sense of where “ghost” buildings should be standing. They’ll also be on paper, so workers can write, draw, and stick pins to them.

Welch landed 12 hours ago, and Kunce said they “had already pushed three to four more maps to her.”

A part of the city of Tacloban before and after it was mapped by the Humanitarian
OSM Team. Roads, buildings, and bodies of water were missing before volunteers
added them.

The Red Cross began to investigate using geospatial data after the massive earthquake in Haiti in 2010. Using pre-existing satellite data, volunteers mapped almost the entirety of Port-au-Prince in OSM, creating data which became the backbone for software that helped organize aid and manage search-and-rescue operations.

That massive volunteer effort convinced leaders at the American Red Cross to increase the staff focusing on their digital maps, or geographic information systems (GIS). They've seen a huge increase in both the quality and quantity of maps since then.

But that’s not all maps can do.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), operated by the U.S. Department of Defense, has already captured satellite imagery of the Philippines. That agency has decided where the very worst damage is, and has sent the coordinates of those areas to the Red Cross. But, as of 7 p.m. Monday, the Red Cross doesn’t have that actual imagery of those sites yet.

The goal of the Red Cross geospatial team, said Kunce, was to help workers “make decisions based on evidence, not intuition.” The team “puts as much data in the hands of responders as possible.” What does that mean? Thanks to volunteers, the Red Cross knows where roads and buildings should be. But until it gets the second set of data, describing the land after the storm, it doesn't know where roads and buildings actually are. Until it gets the new data, its volunteers can’t decide which of, say, three roads to use to send food and water to an isolated village.

Right now, they can’t make those decisions.

Kunce said the U.S. State Department was negotiating with the NGA for that imagery to be released to the Red Cross. But, as of publishing, it’s not there yet.

When open data advocates discuss data licenses, they rarely discuss them in terms of life-and-death. But, every hour that the Red Cross does not receive this imagery, better decisions cannot be made about where to send supplies or where to conduct rescues.

And after that imagery does arrive, OSM volunteers around the world can compare it to the pre-storm structures, marking each of the 30,000 buildings as unharmed, damaged, or destroyed. That phase, which hasn’t yet begun, will help rescuers prioritize their efforts.

OSM isn’t the only organization using online volunteers to help the Philippines: MicroMappers, run by a veteran of OSM efforts in Haiti, used volunteer-sorted tweets to determine areas which most required relief. Talking to me, Kunce said the digital “commodification of maps” generally had contributed to a flourishing in their quantity and quality across many different aid organizations.

“If you put a map in the hands of somebody, they’re going to ask for another map,” said Kunce. Let’s hope the government can put better maps in the hands of the Red Cross—and the workers on the ground—soon.

Cattle Ranchers Track Wolves with GPS, Computers

As reported by the Spokesman Review: Before the sun breaks over the mountains, Leisa Hill is firing up a generator in a remote cow camp in eastern Stevens County.

Soon she’ll be poring over satellite data points on her laptop, tracking the recent wanderings of a GPS-collared wolf.

Hill is a range rider whose family grazes 1,300 head of cattle in the Smackout pack’s territory. Knowing the collared wolf’s whereabouts helps her plan her day.

She’ll spend the next 12 to 16 hours visiting the scattered herd by horseback or ATV. Through the regular patrols, she’s alerting the Smackout pack that cattle aren't easy prey.

Her work is paying off. Last year, 100 percent of the herd returned from the U.S. Forest Service allotments and private pastures that provide summer and fall forage. This year’s count isn't final, but the tallies look promising, said Hill’s dad, John Dawson.

“We've lost nothing to wolves,” he said.

Hill’s range rider work is part of a pilot that involves two generations of a northeastern Washington ranch family, the state and Conservation Northwest. The aim is to keep Washington’s growing wolf population out of trouble.

Last year, government trappers and sharpshooters killed seven members of the Wedge pack for repeatedly attacking another Stevens County rancher’s cattle.

That short-term fix came at a high political price: The state Department of Fish and Wildlife received 12,000 emails about the decision, mostly in opposition. Two wolves have again been spotted in the Wedge pack’s territory, either remnants of the original pack or new wolves moving in.

It upped the ante for all sides to be proactive.

Ranchers can’t fight public opinion

Many Washington residents want wolves, said Dawson, a 70-year-old rancher whose son, Jeff, also runs a Stevens County cattle operation.

“I can’t fight that,” John Dawson said of public opinion. “You have to meet in the middle; you have no choice.

“We put most of our cattle in wolf territory for the summer,” he said. “I've been trying to learn as much as possible about wolves so we can meet them at the door.”

For ranchers, “it’s a new business now, a new world,” said Jay Kehne of Conservation Northwest, a Bellingham-based environmental group that works on issues across Washington and British Columbia.

Conservation Northwest supported last year’s controversial decision to remove the Wedge pack. “We wanted to do what we felt was scientifically right, what was supported by the evidence, what people knowledgeable about cattle and wolf behavior were telling us,” Kehne said.

But the organization obviously prefers preventive, nonlethal measures, he said. Conservation Northwest had talked to Alberta and Montana cattle ranchers who use range riders and was looking for Washington ranchers willing to try it. The Dawsons were interested.

Conservation Northwest helps finance three range riders in Washington – the Dawsons in Stevens County, and others in Cle Elem and Wenatchee.

Hiring a range rider costs $15,000 to $20,000 for the five-month grazing season, Kehne said. The state and individual ranchers, including Dawson, also contribute to the cost.

In addition, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife provides daily satellite downloads on GPS-collared wolves to help range riders manage the cows.

Collared wolves are known as “Judas wolves” for betraying the pack’s location.

The downloads give the wolves’ locations for the past 24 hours, though the system isn’t foolproof, said Jay Shepherd, a state wildlife conflict specialist. Dense stands of trees can block signals, and the timing of satellite orbits affects data collection.

Last winter, the state captured and collared three wolves in the Smackout pack. One of the collars has a radio-based signal that can be detected when the wolf is nearby. The other two wolves received GPS collars. One of the collars has stopped working. The remaining GPS collar is on a young male that doesn’t always stay with the pack.

Ranchers must sign an agreement to access the satellite downloads. “They understand it is sensitive data that’s not to be shared,” said Stephanie Simek, the state’s wildlife conflict section manager.

GPS tracking adds a high-tech element to modern range riding, but much of it is still grunt work. The Smackout pack’s territory covers about 400 square miles. John and Jeff Dawson’s cattle graze 10 to 15 percent of the pack’s territory, but their range encompasses the heart of it.

Leisa Hill’s work starts in early June, when the cows and calves are turned loose on Forest Service allotments and private pastures. The range riding continues through 100-degree August days and wraps up in early November after the first snowfall.

She travels nearly 1,000 miles each month by horse and ATV through thick timber to reach scattered grazing areas. She watches for bunched or nervous cows, as well as sick or injured animals that wolves might consider easy prey.

She’s also alert to patterns in the wolves’ movements. Regular visits to a particular site probably indicate the presence of a carcass.

Hill has fired noise-makers to scare off adult wolves that were in the same pasture as cows. Last year, she spotted four wolf pups on the road.

The 46-year-old prefers to stay in the background, declining to be interviewed for this story. However, “the success of this range rider program is because of Leisa,” her father said. “She knows the range and she understands cow psychology.”

Skinny calves mean a financial loss

On a recent fall morning, John Dawson drove a pickup over Forest Service roads past small clusters of Black Angus, Herefords and cream-colored Charolais cows with their calves.

The cows were just how he likes to see them: relaxed, spread out and eating. Calves should be putting on 2 to 3 pounds a day.

“When they’re not laying around, resting and eating, they’re not gaining,” he said.

Dawson heard his first wolf howl in 2011, the year before the range rider pilot started. He and his son lost seven calves that summer, though they couldn’t find the carcasses to determine cause of death.

The remaining calves were skinnier than usual. They probably spent the summer on the run from wolves, or tightly bunched together and not making good use of the forage, Dawson said. For ranchers, skinny calves can be a bigger financial blow than losing animals.

Say a rancher has 500 calves and they each come in 40 pounds lighter than normal. At a market price of $1.50 per pound, “that’s a bigger loss ($30,000) than losing seven calves, which is about a $5,000 loss,” he said.

Over the past two years, the Dawsons have seen robust weight gain in their calves. They credit the range rider program.

Earlier this year, Jeff Dawson and Shepherd, the state wildlife conflict specialist, talked with Klickitat County cattle ranchers. Wolves have been spotted in south-central Washington, and some of those ranchers are starting to experiment with range riders.

“The success the Dawsons have had has gone a long way to helping promote nonlethal means and proactive measures to reduce conflict,” said Jack Field, the Washington Cattlemen’s Association’s executive vice president.

If ranchers take extra steps to protect their animals, the public is more likely to accept the occasional need to kill wolves that repeatedly attack livestock, said Conservation Northwest’s Kehne.

John Dawson and his wife, Melva, spent decades building their ranch, working other jobs while they grew the herd. To preserve that legacy, the family was willing to try new ways of doing business, he said.

“I think (range riding) would work for a good share of other ranchers,” he said. But “they have to be open-minded enough to want it to work.”

GPS Navigation Payload Headed in Right Direction

As reported by Space News: Problems with the Exelis-built navigation payload on the U.S. Air Force’s next generation of positioning, navigation and timing satellites appear to be solved, according to a company spokeswoman.

Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, said in September that the GPS 3 navigation payload had no firm delivery date due to manufacturing and processing issues. While the payload’s woes had not yet delayed the GPS 3 program schedule, “we’re running right up against our margins,” Shelton said at the time.

Exelis Geospatial Systems of Rochester, N.Y., is developing the GPS 3 system’s main navigation payload, a role it has had from the beginning of the Lockheed Martin-led program. Exelis spokeswoman Jane Khodos told SpaceNews Nov. 6 “the known technical issues have been resolved.”

Khodos said the navigation payload for the first GPS 3 satellite has been built and is currently being tested with an expected delivery sometime in spring 2014. 

The “navigation payload delays have been driven by first-time development and integration issues, including design changes to eliminate signal crosstalk,” she said. Crosstalk occurs when a signal is broadcast on one circuit and creates an undesired effect on another circuit. GPS 3 will carry a new civil signal that is designed to work with other international global navigation satellite systems.

“GPS 3 will meet all mission and quality requirements,” Khodos said. “Lockheed Martin and Exelis are taking every step necessary to execute successfully, and are rigorously testing the first space vehicle navigation payload to ensure the quality of the GPS 3 design.” 

Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems is the prime contractor on GPS 3, which will feature improved accuracy and better resistance to jamming and other forms of interference than previous generations of GPS craft. Currently the Air Force has eight GPS 3 satellites either fully or partially under contract with Lockheed Martin, and the service earlier this year signaled its intent to order another 12 from the incumbent contractor. But Shelton has said the GPS-3 program’s future is a “question mark,” and that the service may look to try out “alternative architectures” for space-based navigation. 

In December 2012, Exelis announced it had integrated and performed initial testing of a payload aboard a prototype GPS 3 satellite.

The GPS 3 satellites currently are slated to start launching in 2015.

Meanwhile, Exelis announced Nov. 4 that software used to simulate the behavior of GPS signals in space and better understand the satellites’ exact position, completed factory testing. The system will be used as part of the GPS Operational Control Segment (OCX), built by Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems of Aurora, Colo.

The OCX is expected to support the GPS 3 constellation’s stringent accuracy, anti-jam and information assurance requirements. The system also will be backward compatible with the current generation of GPS satellites.

All About Beamforming, the Faster Wi-Fi You Didn't Know You Needed

As reported by PC World: Beamforming is one of those concepts that seem so simple that you wonder why no one thought of it before. Instead of broadcasting a signal to a wide area, hoping to reach your target, why not concentrate the signal and aim it directly at the target?

Sometimes the simplest concepts are the most difficult to execute, especially at retail price points. Fortunately, beamforming is finally becoming a common feature in 802.11ac Wi-Fi routers (at least at the high end). Here’s how it works.

First, a bit of background: Beamforming was actually an optional feature of the older 802.11n standard, but the IEEE (the international body that establishes these standards) didn’t spell out how exactly it was to be implemented. The router you bought might have used one technique, but if the Wi-Fi adapter in your laptop used a different implementation, beamforming wouldn’t work.

Some vendors developed pre-paired 802.11n kits (with Netgear’s WNHDB3004 Wireless Home Theater Kit being one of the best examples), but these tended to be expensive, and they never had much of an impact on the market.

The IEEE didn’t make the same mistake with the 802.11ac standard that’s in today’s high-end devices. Companies building 802.11ac products don’t have to implement beamforming, but if they do, they must do so in a prescribed fashion. This ensures that every company’s products will work together. If one device (such as the router) supports beamforming, but the other (such as the Wi-Fi adapter in your router) doesn’t, they’ll still work together. They just won’t take advantage of the technology.

Beamforming can help improve wireless bandwidth utilization, and it can increase a wireless network’s range. This, in turn, can improve video streaming, voice quality, and other bandwidth- and latency-sensitive transmissions.

Beamforming is made possible by transmitters and receivers that use MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) technology: Data is sent and received using multiple antennas to increase throughput and range. MIMO was first introduced with the 802.11n standard, and it remains an important feature of the 802.11ac standard.

How beamforming works

Wireless routers (or access points) and wireless adapters that don’t support beamforming broadcast data pretty much equally in all directions. For a mental picture, think of a lamp without a shade as the wireless router: The bulb (transmitter) radiates light (data) in all directions.

Devices that support beamforming focus their signals toward each client, concentrating the data transmission so that more data reaches the targeted device instead of radiating out into the atmosphere. Think of putting a shade on the lamp (the wireless router) to reduce the amount of light (data) radiating in all directions. Now poke holes in the shade, so that concentrated beams of light travel to defined locations (your Wi-Fi clients) in the room.

If the Wi-Fi client also supports beamforming, the router and client can exchange information about their respective locations in order to determine the optimal signal path. Any device that beamforms its signals is called a beamformer, and any device that receives beamformed signals is called a beamformee.

Netgear's Beamforming+

As mentioned earlier, beamforming support is an optional element of the 802.11ac standard, and any vendor offering it must support a specific technique. But the vendor can also offer other types of beamforming in addition to that standard technique.

Netgear’s Beamforming+ is a superset of the beamforming technique defined in the 802.11ac standard, so it’s interoperable with any other 802.11ac device that also supports beamforming. But Beamforming+ does not require the client device to support beamforming, so you could see range and throughput improvements by pairing one of Netgear’s routers (specifically, Netgear’s model R6300, R6200, and R6250) with any 5GHz Wi-Fi device (Netgear’s R7000 Nighthawk router also supports beamforming on its 2.4GHz network).

Netgear is not the only router manufacturer to support beamforming, of course. It’s becoming a common feature on all of the higher-end Wi-Fi routers and access points. If you’re in the market and want a router that supports beamforming, check the router’s specs on the box or at the vendor’s website. Here are three other routers you might consider: the Linksys EA6900, the D-Link DIR-868L, and the Trendnet TEW-812DRU.

New Foundation Formed to Pursue eLoran as Backup for GPS

As reported by Inside GNSS: A new nonprofit has been launched to push for repurposing the United States’ old C-Loran infrastructure to support a new, privately funded Enhanced Loran (eLoran) service as a backup to GPS.

The Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation (RNT Foundation), headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, was formed to support the creation of an Enhanced Loran or eLoran service, possibly through a public private partnership to be funded by the system’s users. ELoran, they said, is needed to provide a backup to GPS, a key element of the nation’s critical infrastructure that is increasingly at risk.

“The Department of Homeland Security has determined that the GPS timing signal is essential for the operation of 11 of the nation’s 16 critical infrastructure sectors; all sectors use GPS information in some form. The number of jamming and spoofing incidents in the US continues to grow each year and the threat to our national, homeland and economic security increases,” the RNT Foundation wrote in a white paper released Wednesday (November 6, 2013).

The need for some sort of secondary system was underscored by a Government Accountability Office report, also released Wednesday, that said federal agencies have failed to do enough to backup the GPS system and mitigate disruptions.

“Few people realize how navigation and timing services are essential to nearly every facet of our lives,” said RNT President and Executive Director Dana Goward in a statement. “Every nation needs multiple, and complementary services to help ensure navigation and timing signals are available whenever and wherever needed.”

Goward recently retired from the U.S. Coast Guard where he was director for Marine Transportation Systems. He served more than 40 years in the Coast Guard, both in uniform and as a civilian, and led delegations to several international organizations as the nation’s maritime navigation authority.

Joining Goward at the foundation as vice president is Martin Faga, a former CEO of MITRE Corporation and a past assistant secretary of the Air Force. “Our society has become dependent on navigation and timing systems, requiring a robust backup to our primary Global Navigation Space Systems, like GPS and others,” Faga said in the organization’s announcement.

Loran, shorthand for LOng RAnge Navigation, is a network of fixed, terrestrial radio beacons that broadcasts signals centered on 100kHz. This is a far lower frequency than that used by the GPS system, meaning Loran signals will not be interfered with by a jammer targeting GPS signals. Loran signals are also far more powerful, 1.3 million times stronger on average, said Goward — which means they can be used indoors, underground, and under water. Proponents insist that eLoran can be a fully independent source of positioning and timing signals and a backup to GPS if it were disrupted.

ELoran, which is in use in several nations around the world, has proven itself to be a reliable backup, proponents say.

“The British system has shown that the technology is more than mature. The South Koreans — the (request for proposals) to build their system closes on the 13th of this month — they do not see it as developmental; they see it as current market technology. As do apparently the Saudis and the Indians who are also looking to contract for systems,” said Goward.

At one point, the United States was also going to establish an eLoran network and spent some $160 million to upgrade the existing C-Loran beacons, before changing direction. Shortly after it came into office, the Obama administration decided to terminate the U.S. program, possibly as a cost-saving measure. It ceased operation early in 2010.

Resurrecting plans for eLoran in the United States would give the country a separate system with 8-10 meter navigation accuracy and time accuracy of better than 50 nanoseconds, said the foundation’s white paper. The system could be built in the continental U.S. in three years for about $40 million with usable signals potentially available within the first year of operation. The cost to run the systems would be about $16 million a year, the organization estimated.

Funding Ideas: Fees on Receivers, Telephones, Electricity
To finance the system the foundation is proposing a public-private partnership (P3) be formed to take over the existing Loran sites and convert then to eLoran service. Revenue could come from carrying high-priority, critical text messages for a fee or contracting with companies or government agencies to use eLoran to detect GPS interference. The P3 could also charge for a high-accuracy timing service that provides precision users with timing signals as accurate as 30 nanoseconds.

Among the other ideas are a $1 tax on each standalone or integrated eLoran and satellite navigation receiver sold — which could generate $20 million annually in the United States and “fund operation of the entire system” according to the white paper. A temporary eight-cent fee on every monthly U.S. cell phone and electric bill could, in one year, provide enough funding to endow the P3 in perpetuity.

“All of those are just possible funding ideas. We think there are many ways that the public-private partnership could be funded with no direct cost to the taxpayer,” Goward told Inside GNSS.

Whether or not the foundation would be part of the public-private partnership is to be determined.

“The important thing is to get these things done. Whether we are part of the partnership or not, or we just advocate for the partnership – as long as the end result is that the U.S. gets the system and the resiliency that we need to protect our critical infrastructure and ensure our citizens are safe we’ll consider it a job well done,” Goward said.

One company that would like to be part of the public-private partnership is UrsaNav, Inc., of Chesapeake, Va.

UrsaNav would “absolutely” be interested in participating in a future eLoran system supported by the private sector, president and co-founder Charles Schue told Inside GNSS. “I think there is room in the pubic private partnership for various interested companies.”

The firm is already among the supporters of the foundation and has provided some financial backing, said Schue.

The opportunity could be lost if there is no action soon, he added.

“They are pretty far along (in tearing down the existing sites), said Schue, “and they are moving pretty fast. They have taken down a lot of antennas already — the transmitting antennas.”

The government plans to take down more antennas in December and still more in March 2104, he said.

“They are also removing equipment — technology. So you have, from my perspective, $160 million of taxpayer money spent to put new technology at the sites and that technology seems to be headed out the door to the scrap pile,” said Schue. “That seems to be a real waste.”

If a possibility exists that the sites might be put to use for eLoran, then perhaps work to dismantle and divest the sites should be delayed, suggested Schue. “It would seem to me that during the period that they are thinking about it, they would want to preserve stuff instead of getting rid of stuff that you may have to go out and buy again.”

Getting a decision on the sites, however, may not be easy.

“It is not a technical problem,” said Schue. “It is probably not even a money problem because the money is so small. It is just the political will for the agencies that are charged with solving GPS vulnerability — that’s (the departments of Homeland Security, Transportation and Defense) — to just make a decision to do something. That’s all that’s required is the decision. The technology is proven and the money is budget dust.”

Critical Infrastructure Not Prepared for GPS Disruption

As reported by GCN: Although position, navigation and timing services from the Global Positioning System are widely used in the nation’s critical infrastructure, government and industry are not prepared to address the risks of GPS disruptions, according to a recent study.

The Government Accountability Office said GPS has become “an invisible utility” underpinning many applications critical to the nation’s security and economy. A number of executive directives have mandated programs to detect and mitigate accidental or malicious interference, but, “sectors’ increasing dependency on GPS leaves them potentially vulnerable to disruptions,” GAO concludes.

The Transportation and Homeland Security departments have primary responsibility for ensuring the security of systems relying on GPS, but a lack of resources and cooperation has limited progress in identifying backup technologies in the last eight years.

In its report, GPS Disruptions: Efforts to Assess Risks to Critical Infrastructure and Coordinate Agency Actions Should Be Enhanced, GAO recommends that DHS produce a more reliable assessment of the risks of GPS disruption together with metrics for the effectiveness of risk mitigation and that the two departments establish a formal agreement laying out roles and responsibilities.

GPS is a satellite-based system providing precise timing signals that can also be used to determine position and for navigation. Timing functions are used widely in critical infrastructure, and transportation industries, particularly aviation and maritime, use GPS for navigation. Because it relies on radio signals, GPS is susceptible to natural interference from weather on Earth and in space, to accidental interference from other devices and to intentional blocking or spoofing. 

Disruptions to service have not been common. The U.S. Coast Guard, which fields reports of GPS problems, received 44 such reports in 2012. But reporting is not mandatory, and GAO noted that USCG’s role is not widely known, so incidents could be underreported.

GAO examined the use of GPS in four critical infrastructure sectors — communications, energy, financial services and transportation — as well as DHS and DOT efforts at risk management. The communications and transportation industries are most reliant on the service, although the financial services and energy sectors use its timing features to a lesser extent.

DHS has produced a National Risk Estimate for GPS, released in 2012 for official use only. GAO criticized the report, saying it is incomplete and has limited usefulness because it does not meet the department’s own guidance for risk management. DHS defended the study, saying that its scope was limited, that it fulfills its intended purposes and that it “sufficiently characterized the risk environment.”

GPS is the backbone for NextGen, the Federal Aviation Administration’s next-generation air traffic control system, and because of its use for navigation DOT is the lead civilian agency for GPS reliability efforts. The department was charged in a 2004 national security directive with developing backup capabilities for government and industry, with the assistance of DHS. An implementation plan for a national position, navigation and timing architecture has been released, and potential backup alternatives for FAA NextGen are being researched. Current navigational alternatives to GPS do not support NextGen capabilities, and FAA expects to make a decision by 2016 on a backup system.

USCG is doing research to test alternative non-space-based sources of timing, NIST is researching the possibility of using the nation’s fiber networks as an alternative, and DHS has commissioned a study of ways to detect and mitigate sources of disruptions. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency also is working on alternative navigation tools. 

But GAO found little progress had been made in identifying adequate backup technologies, due to a lack of staffing and budget and to a lack of cooperation between the two lead departments. Roles in the effort have not been clearly defined, and DOT sees its job as addressing only the needs of the transportation sector, leaving the rest to DHS. But DHS says that the terms of the directive put DOT in the lead position.

DHS said that it will establish a formal, written agreement with DOT “that will clearly delineate roles and responsibilities” in developing GPS backup capabilities. But it noted that “the ability to fully implement agreed-upon shared tasks will be contingent on the availability of personnel and financial resources.”

Inertial Sensors Boost Smartphone GPS Performance

As reported by MIT Technology Review: If you've ever used a smartphone to navigate, you’ll know that one of the biggest problems is running out of juice. GPS sensors are a significant battery drain and so any journey of significant length requires some kind of external power source. Added to that is the difficulty in even getting a GPS signal in city center locations where towering office blocks, bridges and tunnels regularly conspire to block the signal.

So a trick that reduces power consumption while increasing the device’s positioning accuracy would surely be of use.

Today, Cheng Bo at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and a few pals say they've developed just such a program, called SmartLoc, and have tested it extensively while travelling throughout the windy city.

They say that in the city, GPS has a positioning accuracy of about 40 meters. By comparison, their SmartLoc system pinpoints its location to within 20 meters, 90 per cent of the time.

So how have these guys achieved this improvement? The trick that Bo and pals use is to exploit the smartphone’s inertial sensors to determine its position whenever the GPS is off line.

The way this works is straightforward. Imagine a smartphone fixed to the windscreen of a car driving around town. Given a GPS reading to start off with, the smartphone knows where it is on its built-in or online map. It then uses the inertial sensor to measure its acceleration, indicating a move forwards or a turn to the left or right and so on.

By itself, this kind of data is not very useful because it’s hard to tell how far the vehicle has traveled and whether the acceleration was the result of the car speeding up or going over a humpback bridge, for example.

To get around this, the smartphone examines the section of road on the map looking for road layouts and features that might influence the sensors; things like bends in the road, traffic lights, humpback bridges and so on. Each of these has a specific inertial signature that the phone can spot. In this way, it can match the inertial signals to the road features at that point.

The key here is that each road feature has a unique signature. Bo and co have discovered a wide range of inertial signatures, such as the deceleration, waiting and acceleration associated with a set of traffic lights, the forces associated with turnings (and how these differ from the forces generated by changing lanes, for example) and even the change in the force of gravity when going over a bridge.

Note the conspicuously missing GPS positions
in the area of the Eisenhower tunnel on I-70 in
Colorado.

Having gathered this data, the SmartLoc program looks for these signatures while the car is on the move. These guys have tested it using a Galaxy S3 smartphone on the city streets in Chicago and say it works well. They point out that in the city center, the GPS signal can disappear for distances of up to a kilometer, which would leave a conventional navigation system entirely confused.

However, SmartLoc simply fills in the gaps using its inertial signature database and a map of the area. “Our extensive evaluations shows that SmartLoc improves the localization accuracy to less than 20m for more than 90% roads in Chicago downtown, compared with ≥ 50% with raw GPS data,” they say.

That certainly looks handy. And this kind of performance could also help save battery power by allowing a smartphone to periodically switch off the GPS sensor and run only using the inertial sensor.

What Bo and co don’t do is explain their plans for their new system. One obvious idea would be to release it as an app–it clearly already works on the Android platform. Another idea would be to sell the technology to an existing mapping company. Perhaps they’re planning both. Whatever the goal, it seems worth keeping an eye on.