Mobile communications by satellite in Europe overview of ESA activities

There exists a great unsatisfied demand for mobile communications in Europe. The road transport industry in particular is showing much interest for a system offering private business networks covering the entire European continent and, if possible, North America and the Middle East. Recent market surveys carried out for ESA have revealed that satellites would be the best and even the only way to satisfy this demand in the short-term future. In the framework of its PROSAT programme, ESA has developed a data transmission system, named PRODAT, which will be used for experiments and demonstrations until the end of 1988. It features a self-adaptive ARQ technique that has been designed primarily to cope with the difficult environment of land-mobile communications by satellite.