A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment,
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for
the degree of Masters of Science in Engineering (Electrical), 2017The ability to communicate effectively is of key importance in military scenarios. The
ability to interfere with these communications is a useful tool in gaining competitive
advantages by disrupting enemy communications and protecting allied troops against
threats such as remotely detonated explosives. By reducing the number of corrupt bits
required by using customised error patterns, the transmission time required by a jammer
can be reduced without sacrificing effectiveness. To this end a MATLAB simulation of
the GSM control channel forward error correction scheme is tested against four jamming
methodologies and three bit corruption techniques. These methodologies are aimed at
minimising the number of transmitted jamming bits required from a jammer to prevent
communications on the channel. By using custom error patterns it is possible to target
individual components of the forward error correction scheme and bypass others. A ran
dom error approach is implemented to test the system against random errors on the
channel, a burst error approach is implemented to test the convolutional code against
burst errors, and two proposed custom error patterns are implemented aimed at exploiting the Fire code’s error detection method. The burst error pattern approach required the
least number of transmitted jamming bits. The system also shows improvements over
current control channel jamming techniques in literature.XL201
