GAUSS satellite solution for location‐based services

Abstract

SUMMARYThe project was carried by an industrial Consortium, involving nine European companies, with proven experience and complementary skill in the fields of telecommunication, equipment manufacturing, communication and navigation system engineering, service provisioning. The GAUSS Team involves ARNI (Azienda Regionale per la Navigazione Interna, I), ASCOM (CH), ERICSSON Telecomunicazioni (I), GMV (E), TELEFONICA (E), THALES Navigation (F), TTI Norte (E), Space Engineering (I) and TELESPAZIO (I) as project co-ordinator. The work allocation was in line with the companies market and technological prospects, in view of future developments taking benefits from the experience and know-how acquired in the GAUSS project.GAUSS objective was to design and demonstrate the feasibility of a system providing high quality Location-based services, from the integration of Satellite Navigation and Communications, within the contexts of GALILEO and the UMTS technology.The GAUSS solution addresses two classes of users profiles, belonging to info-mobility and intermodality (road-river) markets. It supports highly reliable, near real-time two-way communication between mobile users and service centre/provider. GAUSS developed a system, which integrates advanced communication and precise navigation, for providing reliable and effective location-based services oriented to transport and mobility applications (freight and fleet management, road safety and info-mobility, emergency assistance, dangerous goods transportation control, inter-modal transport). The GAUSS system combines off-the-shelf and new developed technologies, using S-UMTS 3GPP compliant point-to-point and broadcasting packet-based communication and GNSS1-EGNOS accurate positioning. It has an open architecture ready to operate with the future GALILEO and UMTS, and further exploitation scenarios.This paper provides an overview of the project and the main achieved results, along with their assessment and evaluation in terms of possible enhancements and future exploitations.