EGNOS Aviation Services Evolution

The European Commission is defining the long term evolution of the EGNOS programme beyond the EGNOS Service Release of EGNOS V3 currently defined. Evolutions shall support the implementation of safer and more efficient aviation operations. In this sense, further evolutions of EGNOS services for aviation safety beyond 2025 could take any of the following three directions:

• Enlarge the provision of EGNOS services to Communication Navigation Surveillance (CNS) and Air Traffic Management (ATM) beyond navigation, notably to address surveillance (ADS-B) and possibly support timing services for communication systems;
• Provide additional features to increase the robustness against external intentional or unintentional threats/attacks to the EGNOS navigation service, for instance by adding authentication to GNSS signals or ad hoc features at antenna and receiver level;
• Enhance the navigation, positioning and/or timing performance provided at user level, for instance by improving the vertical position accuracy and the time-to-alert to enable supporting Cat-II approach procedures.

Project objectives

The aims are to analyse and define the reasons motivating evolutions along those three axes beyond 2025, determine constraints and pre-requisites, and assess the added value to end users. The analysis shall consider each area separately and determine under what condition it would be beneficial for the programme to implement these services. The analysis shall focus on:

1. Identifying user requirements for each of these new services and how they translate into service requirements for EGNOS;
2. Defining the associated regulatory constraints and safety analyses required before the service can be implemented operationally;
3. Analysing the added value for aviation end users and defining how the service could be provided, to enable a programmatic decision on which service should be implemented as a priority.