EGNOS Services

EGNOS
Title	EGNOS Services
Edited by	GMV
Level	Basic
Year of Publication	2011

EGNOS (European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service) is the European Satellite Based Augmentation Service (SBAS) that provides services based on the Global Positioning System (GPS) signals as well as enhanced accuracy and integrity information.

EGNOS supports three services: the Open Service (OS), the Safety of Life Service (SoL), and the Commercial Data Distribution Service (CDDS).

Introduction

EGNOS missions support a wide range of applications. For this reason and to ease a joint service provision with Galileo, Mission requirements are stated in terms of different Services that EGNOS will support, namely:

• The EGNOS Open Service (OS), freely available to the public in Europe.
• The EGNOS Safety of Life (SoL) Service, that will provide the most stringent level of signal-in-space performance to all Safety of Life user communities in Europe.
• The EGNOS Commercial Data Distribution Service (CDDS) Service, for customers who require enhanced performance for commercial and professional use.

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The service diversity provided by EGNOS will support a wide range of applications, user communities and domains.

EGNOS Open Service

Accuracy improvement gained with EGNOS Open Service

On the 1st October 2009, the European Commission declared that EGNOS' basic navigation signal was operationally ready as an open and free service. In making this announcement, EGNOS Open Service started to provide European users with unprecedented positioning precision by improving the accuracy of standalone GPS.

The continuous monitoring of the EGNOS signal shows accuracy gains with respect to GPS within one to two meters and is available more than 99 percent of the time.

EGNOS Safety of Life

The second key milestone in the EGNOS Programme was the declaration of the EGNOS SoL Service operational. On the 2nd March 2011, the European Satellite Services Provider (ESSP) declared the Safety-of-Life (SoL) signal officially available for aviation with the authorization of the European Commission (EC) to provide the service. At this point message type 0 (MT0) that used to transmit the same contents as a regular MT2 message before certification of EGNOS for civil aviation was removed. This service supports, since its announcement, a great number of applications in the transport domain and renders safety-critical operations safer. Moreover, it provides a valuable integrity message to inform the user within six seconds in case of a malfunction of the signal.

The European Union has expressed its commitment to the long term support of EGNOS, which will provide services along with Galileo when it becomes operational.

In the same way, the European Commission is planning to extend the coverage of the GEO satellites transmitting the EGNOS signal. While the signal currently covers most European states, it has the built-in capability to extend the coverage area to other regions, such as countries on the EU’s borders and North Africa.

EGNOS Commercial Data Distribution Service

Potential application where professional GNSS services could be provided through diverse communication channels by integrating EDAS

Additionally, the provision of EGNOS commercial products as a result of the Commercial Data Distribution Service will provide added value to Navigation applications, commercial products and will widen the extent of EGNOS applicability to a vast number of environments and purposes.

CDDS will permit users to access additional data that is not provided by the EGNOS Signal broadcast by the geostationary satellites. Some examples of potential applications that could be provided are mentioned in EGNOS Open Service Definition Document: provision of EGNOS information in the RTCM format; EGNOS pseudolites; provision of EGNOS services through RDS, DAB, Internet; accurate ionospheric delay/TEC maps; provision of RIMS data; provision of performance data (e.g. XPL availability maps, GIVE maps, etc.); provision of EGNOS message files.

In order to gather user requirements for the final CDDS, an initial service called EGNOS Data Access Service (EDAS) is being provided by the EC.

In the same way the EGNOS Commercial Data Distribution Service suggests a wide range of scenarios for harnessing EDAS to support diverse services, such as:

• Redistribution of EGNOS augmentation messages
• A-GNSS for Location Bases Services
• Professional GNSS services