Satellite communication requirements for 4D air traffic management

SESAR Project 15.2.6 is developing generally applicable mission requirements for a future European satellite communications infrastructure aimed at being an enabler for 4D air traffic management. Together with terrestrial datalink technologies in a multilink environment, satellite communications is envisaged to provide performance that would be too challenging and expensive to achieve for a single technology. Taking these requirements as an input, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Iris programme has, since 2007, been developing a suitable satellite system in close collaboration with stakeholders including SESAR JU, Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs), aviation stakeholders, the European Commission and EUROCONTROL. A key focus of the requirements is the user need for globally interoperable systems. With this context, development work within the Iris programme revolves around development of a communication standard (CS) for satellite based ATM communications and the validation infrastructure for the satellite communication system enabler. A proposal for a suitable standard will be completed in 2013. It is the ambition of this work to contribute to an update of the ICAO SARPs and associated technical manual at ICAO level. Activity for a proposal of update of the SARPs is coordinated by EUROCONTROL in the NEXUS working group. The mission requirements have matured in many areas providing an increasingly solid framework for designing and judging derived system designs. Indeed the next step for P15.2.6 in terms of verification is to define the required infrastructure. These verification infrastructure requirements will also be taken as input by ESA as the entity responsible for development of verification infrastructure for the proposed solution. Development of the requirements has centred on achieving a balance between needs for performance, and low costs for end users in terms of both equipage and operation, particularly with respect to the user terminal. Furthermore, work has addressed the financial viability of the system through provision of AOC services in addition to ATC services, and with the possibility of competing and yet seamlessly interoperable service providers.