Aviation stakeholders begin scrutinising system design options

The Review Board will be scrutinising whether the designs proposed by the ANTARES team are technically sound, and whether ANTARES is sufficiently mature to start detailed design of, on one side, the communication protocols and the associated verification testbed and, on the other side, the satellite system infrastructure including the ground and space segments and user terminals to be used on-board aircraft. The board consists of ESA personnel under the authority of ESA’s Inspector General and external reviewers representing the SESAR Joint Undertaking (SJU), Eurocontrol, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), Airbus and the ATM Satcom Safety Board.

The industrial team has been working on the ANTARES design throughout 2010, performing the technical trade-off analyses on all elements of the system design. As SESAR is currently in the process of refining its requirements, the ANTARES team has had to deal with several unknowns such as the number of aircraft that will use the operational system, the maximum acceptable transit delay for the most urgent data exchanges, or whether specific data security mechanisms should be incorporated in the link, explains Nathalie Ricard, Head of the ESA Iris Programme Office.

“In order to progress, the ANTARES team analysed the impact of variation of those requirement options on the design. As a result, ANTARES has now developed a whole set of technical options which will now be scrutinised and assessed during the review,” says Ms. Ricard. “The purpose is to review each option, try to converge on what best answers user needs, help consolidate the understanding of what aviation requires in the process, and define how to go forward together with the SESAR JU.”

"Satellite communication is an essential element of the multilink communication infrastructure in SESAR," explains. Mr. Philippe Renaud, Programme Manager of the SESAR JU Communication projects. "Satellite will complement the ground-based infrastructure in continental airspace to achieve the necessary availability and it will be the primary means of communication in oceanic and remote airspaces. It is vital that Satcom meets the demanding ATM requirements at an affordable cost. The SRR is, in our view ,a vital step to secure that the proposed design will serve the expectations."

To guarantee that system options would be studied with the ultimate goal to lower the cost of user terminals and of the satellite communication service, the impact of requirements changes had to be assessed across all system elements. The ANTARES team instigated a System Integrated Team that gathered expertise from satellite manufacturing, communication system design and avionics manufacturers to carry out design analyses with an end-to-end perspective. Experts from Thales Alenia Space Italy, Thales Alenia Space France, INDRA, Thales Avionics and Honeywell collaborated closely.

“This concurrent approach to design with the perspective to lower the cost for end users is innovative thinking for telecommunication systems, which traditionally focused much more on the space segment,” explains Andrea Santovincenzo, the Iris System Engineer. “This made different industries work closely together for the benefit of the aviation community.”

The ANTARES SRR is planned to last until February 2011. A  presentation of the way forward will follow. The Iris activities of ESA are implemented within the framework of element 10 of the Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) programme. For more information see the links in the column to the right.
 

Published 17 November 2010
Last updated at 06 August 2014 - 10:38