Support to maritime and inland waterways service providers for the transmission of EGNOS Corrections via IALA beacons and AIS/VDES stations

The use of SBAS corrections for navigation, in both coastal waters and inland waterways, has already brought the attention of many European authorities, which are interested in its potential to complement/replace their DGPS radio beacon networks. The European GNSS Agency (GSA) has an active long-term trajectory working to foster the EGNOS adoption in maritime through the launch of several actions whose results will pave the way for the provision of maritime EGNOS services. In this line, GSA awarded the consortium ALG-Indra, ESSP and Alberding with the Specific Contract GSA/OP/07/13/SC24 ‘Support to Maritime Service Providers for the transmission of EGNOS corrections via IALA beacons and AIS/VDES stations’. The main objective of this Specific Contract is to demonstrate the operational performance of the transmission of EGNOS corrections converted to Differential GPS corrections over the existing transmission infrastructure (AIS base stations/IALA beacons) in the Maritime and Inland Waterways (IWW) domains, while providing a detailed cost benefit analysis of the solutions proposed. This service may complement the current GNSS augmentation services exploiting synergies and benefiting from the current infrastructure and standards, facilitating the adoption of EGNOS by maritime and inland waterways authorities. Furthermore, the service has no impact at user level since the DGNSS corrections are transmitted over the existing infrastructure, in the same format and implementing the same integrity mechanisms required for traditional IALA beacons ([1]). This project will allow the maritime and IWW service providers to have a clear understanding about the technical, operational and economic feasibility of the transmission of EGNOS corrections via IALA beacons and AIS/VDES stations.