Europe's role in the next millennium towards the development of the next generation of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS)

This paper studies the state-of-the-art in time and frequency technologies: future clocks, time-transfer and time-dissemination techniques, and their application towards the next-generation of global navigation satellite systems. The requirement for an upgrade to GPS is discussed, and the potential opportunities for European industry are discussed with an identification of key future market areas. We briefly describe the exciting developments towards a seamless, international, wholly-civil GNSS, and show the importance of frequency-band allocation issues in defining the GNSS system architecture. It is concluded that 10 millimetre real-time position determination and 30 picosecond time-transfer capability is technologically achievable, but that the political and institutional issues must first be resolved.