European Constellation Contribution to GNSS

Pedro A. Pablos, Juan R. Martín

Abstract:	This paper shows the more outstanding results of a study carried out to propose an ENSS (European Navigation Satellite System) constellation. The paper shows the benefits that different European constellation alternatives would bring to the user community, even in a future scenario with advanced GPS (no SA, dual frequency) and/or GLONASS. Requirements for safety of life applications (like civil aviation) as well as for land mobile users have been considered. For the European users in general it is most important to maximise the number of visible satellites from Europe, while minimising the cost of the system (number of satellites and deployment). For this reason the type of constellations proposed are based on Geostationary and Inclined GeoSynchronous Orbits (IGSO). Other constellations of this kind could provide a similar service over other regions of the globe. For this reason, a global constellation with world-wide coverage, minimum cost and optimal performance is also shown as reference. Some constellation alternatives with European coverage are proposed, from the minimum (Space Segment) cost one to the maximum performance one. The minimum cost option would allow CAT-I to CAT-III performance using local differential augmentations, while the maximum performance constellation would provide CAT-I directly without any local differential augmentation, and would have a performance over Europe equivalent to GPS and GLONASS constellations together. For all the constellation alternatives presented, significant performance improvements are achieved also for the land mobile users in terms of availability in hostile environments (very high masking angles).
Published in:	Proceedings of the 10th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1997) September 16 - 19, 1997 Kansas City, MO
Pages:	1261 - 1269
Cite this article:	Pablos, Pedro A., Martín, Juan R., "European Constellation Contribution to GNSS," Proceedings of the 10th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GPS 1997), Kansas City, MO, September 1997, pp. 1261-1269.
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