Promoting the integration of satellite and terrestrial communication with Galileo for road transport

The SISTER - “Satcoms in Support of Transport on European Roads” - project will promote the integration of satellite and terrestrial communication with Galileo, the European satellite navigation system. The project’s goal is to enable mass-market take-up by road transport applications.

Satellite navigation services have already proved their value in a large range of road transport applications. Many of these applications require one or two-way communications services in order to function. In many cases to date, terrestrial communication systems such as GSM and GPRS have been employed. However, there are numerous circumstances in which these technologies may not be sufficient to meet the communications requirements. These include:

• High-availability applications in which communications coverage must be comprehensive, such as emergency applications 
• High-reliability applications in which guaranteed quality of service is required, such as dangerous goods tracking 
• High-capacity applications in which the terrestrial network infrastructure may be too expensive for the distribution of large volumes of data to many users, such as digital maps updating

Although satellite communications do not replace the need for terrestrial services in many of these applications, they do serve to complement them and thus lead to an overall superior solution.

To validate the project’s results, five application demonstrations will be carried out at test sites across Europe:

• eCall (Sweden)
• Map updating (Austria, Germany and Slovenia)
• Road user charging (Czech Republic)
• Dangerous goods, integrated testing of eCall, map updating and road user charging (Belgium and the Netherlands)
• Enhanced Galileo services (UK)

Objectives

• Define where, how and when satellite communications can be used and make recommendations for future research and development in the field. 
• Identify how applications need to be adapted in order to use satellite communications.
• Specify and develop a prototype of an integrated satellite communications transceiver that supports integrated GNSS/mobile and satellite communications.
• Develop a prototype of a reconfigurable Galileo receiver.
• Define requirements for a satellite system suitable for providing services to the road transport market.
• Evaluate the performance of Real Time Kinematic-enhanced Galileo positioning technology, optimise its operation and evaluate the benefits of this improved performance for ITS applications that use position data.

Duration and funding
November 2006 - November 2009, funding through the EC DG Enterprise and Industry.
 
Consortium 
Coordinator: Avanti Communications

Partners: ERTICO - ITS Europe, ARS Traffic and Transport Technology, Autoliv Electronics, ComSine, Efkon, Institute for Project Management and Information Technology, Jan de Rijk Logistics, JAST, Luxspace, Navigon, Navteq, Nottingham University, Nottingham Scientific, Surrey Satellite Technology, Teledata, Telematix Services, Volvo Technology, WirelessCar