This White Paper provides engineers and researchers with an experimental evaluation of how the standard 5G handover mechanism can be repurposed for frequency hopping to counter smart jamming attacks — with measured performance data across latency, throughput, and real-time video quality of service.
What you will learn about:
- Why 5G networks, despite their advanced security features, remain susceptible to smart jamming attacks — particularly as affordable software-defined radio devices make it easy to track and disrupt fixed-frequency cellular communications.
- How the inter-frequency handover mechanism, already supported by all 3GPP-compliant commercial devices, can serve as a practical frequency hopping technique that forces jammers to constantly re-detect and re-target the operating frequency.
- What the measured impact on key performance indicators is and how late target cell activation does not degrade performance.
- How real-time applications such as video conferencing perform under active frequency hopping, with a one-hour test demonstrating greater than 99.99% packet reliability and compliance with 3GPP QoS requirements for both conversational video and mission-critical push-to-talk voice.
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IEEE Communications Society and Wiley are proud to bring you this White Paper, sponsored by Rohde & Schwarz
More Information
As 5G networks expand into mission-critical and defense applications, the need for resilient communications has become paramount. While 5G offers significant advantages over legacy systems such as TETRA — including low latency, high data rates, network slicing, and built-in security — it still operates on fixed frequencies per cell, making it vulnerable to smart jammers that can detect and disrupt communications using readily available radio equipment. Frequency hopping, a well-established anti-jamming technique in military radios, is notably absent from standard 5G operation. This white paper investigates a novel approach: leveraging the standard handover procedure to switch the user equipment between cells operating on different frequency bands at regular intervals, effectively creating a frequency hopping overlay without requiring modifications to commercial devices. The study presents experimental measurements across multiple scenarios — comparing different modems, varying hopping rates from 1 to 5 seconds, and testing late target cell activation — and includes a practical quality of service assessment using a real-time video call over the internet.
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