Galileo Navigation Message

Fundamentals
Title	Galileo Navigation Message
Author(s)	J. Sanz Subirana, JM. Juan Zornoza and M. Hernandez-Pajares, University of Catalunia, Spain.
Level	Basic
Year of Publication	2011

The Galileo satellites will broadcast five types of data in four navigation messages: The Freely accessible Navigation Message (F/NAV) and Integrity Navigation Message (I/NAV), the Commercial Navigation Message (C/NAV) and the Governmental Navigation Message (G/NAV). Next table 2 summarises the content of the Galileo messages, with an indication of the associated channels and services (table inspired in [Hofmann-Wellenhof et al., 2008]).

Table 2: Content of the Galileo message types

The Galileo ephemeris parameters are Keplerian-like orbital elements as in GPS. The nominal period update is 3 hours, being valid for a 4 hours time interval. The 1-hour overlap interval is intended to help against short outages or delays. The Galileo Almanac is also similar to the GPS and GLONASS ones.

The Integrity data will provide time-alarms and parameters to compute the integrity risk to support Safety-of-Life applications.

The Supplementary data is expected to provide information to support different envisaged commercial services as differential corrections for High Precision Positioning Service, and different kind of information data as weather alerts, traffic information... The data is encrypted to control the access to authorised users by the service providers.

The Public Regulated data is under governmental control and it is devoted to the Public Regulated Service (PRS). The system will guarantee a high continuity of service with controlled access by encryption of data.

The Search and Rescue data will provide the capability to send acknowledgment SAR messages to a Beacon equipped with a suitable Galileo receiver.

The complete navigation message is transmitted on each data channel as a sequence of frames. A frame is composed of a certain number of sub-frames, and a sub-frame is composed of several pages. This arrangement allows accomplishing the three different main categories of data to be transmitted:

• Repeated at fast rate (for urgent data, such as integrity): page.
• Medium rate (like data required for warm start) : sub-frame.
• Slow rates (like data required for cold start): frame.

The page starts with a Synchronisation Word (SW) followed by the data field. 5 After the data, a Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) parity bits are provided to detect the reception of corrupted data. The page ends with tail bits for the Forward Error Correction (FEC) encoding. Three levels of error coding are applied to the Galileo Message Data Stream:

1. A Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) with error detection capabilities after recovery of the received data
2. A one-half rate Forward Error Correction (FEC). Tail Bits (sequence of zeros) to allow Viterbi decoding.
3. Block Interleaving on the resulting frames: provides robustness to the FEC decoding algorithm by avoiding packets of errors. This scheme allows reducing the bit error ratio in the increased data rates.

Table 3: Frame structure

Figure 2: Galileo Navigation Message Structure (from [Powe, M., 2006]).

References

• Hofmann-Wellenhof, B., Lichtenegger, H., K. and Wasle, E., 2008. GNSS - Global Navigation Satellite Systems. Springer-Verlag, Wien, Austria.
• Powe, M., 2006. Introduction to Galileo. powerpoint presentation, progeny.