Susceptibility of LTE to Downlink Jamming

As LTE gets established as the primary cellular standard it is important to examine its vulnerabilities and availability issues. Researchers started to uncover susceptibilities of the 4G standard by investigating the influence of interference and jamming on the network communication. In this work a software LTE implementation is deployed in a controlled environment to conduct various reproducible jamming attacks targeting the communication of a commercial off-the-shelf mobile device. By running long-term measurements for each attack we gathered statistical data on the jamming power needed to corrupt the communication. These measurements support the analysis and evaluation of theoretically proposed attacks in practice. The obtained insights allow assessing the threat of real-world jamming attacks on public 4G cellular networks.