Inter-satellite ranging and inter-satellite communication links for enhancing GNSS satellite broadcast navigation data

Recently the European Space Agency (ESA) has initiated a number of exploratory Projects, within the General Studies Programme (GSP), to analyze what potential improvements on a GNSS system navigation determination and dissemination performance could be brought by introducing inter-satellite ranging & inter-satellite communication-links. The key improvements targeted by these Projects are the enhancement of the orbit and clock prediction accuracy and the reduction of the dependency from ground infrastructure. Both projects adopted the Galileo system architecture as the initial working point. The first exploratory Project, which was labelled as GNSS+ ( Amarillo and Gerner, 2007; Amarillo et al., 2008), indicated the practical difficulty to implement these new on-board functionalities except at the price of a visible increase of the payload mass and power (e.g. relative to mass and power of the Galileo IOV navigation payload) ( Sánchez and Pulido, 2008); it allowed to define a preliminary system architecture, and it also allowed to identify the technological problems that in practise would likely be encountered. A second exploratory Project, which was labelled as ADVISE, continued the research, targeting a visible simplification of the GNSS+ architecture and an overall consolidation of the design of the most demanding constituents from technology perspective. This article describes the results of the GNSS+ Project as well as the improvements proposed in the frame of the ADVISE Project. As result of the ADVISE Project it has been possible to low very visibly the payload maximum RF power, and to keep the orbit and clock estimation accuracy, which was already on the few cm level.