DLR - Institute of Communications and Navigation

Selected Projects

ARIEL – Air Traffic Resilience

Civil aviation is an important asset of today’s mobile society and belongs to the critical infrastructures. Thus, the protection of civil aviation is of high importance to society. In aviation, economic pressure requests cost reductions and improved efficiency in handling aircraft. As a consequence, the infrastructure and technical systems become more and more interconnected to save costs through re-use of resources and exploitation of synergies. Besides these desired effects, the interconnection of formerly separate technical systems generates new risks. These risks are especially caused by threats from cyberspace. Main goal of the project ARIEL is to perform a holistic risk analysis and evaluation of critical infrastructures in aviation, since these might become the target of sophisticated cyberattacks to create new threats to public safety and security.

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Dependable Navigation

Reliable and ubiquitous positioning and navigation is of central importance for many applications in economy, mass market, and sovereign tasks. With the ongoing development of EGNOS and Galileo, Europe makes a significant contribution to the global provision of navigation infrastructures and will create first prerequisites for a wide spectrum of new positioning, navigation and time services.

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Real Time Services for Maritime Safety and Security 2 (EMS 2)

The project EMS 2 is a part of the joint project “R&D and Real Time Services for maritime Safety and Security”. The project is embedded into the bunch the institutional forces and interdisciplinary completion of research and development activities of the DLR within the maritime domain. The sub-project „Terrestrial and space-based maritime Navigation and Communication“ of the Institute of Communications and Navigation is following the aim to investigate the reliability and protection of navigation and communication systems and to develop new and robust algorithms and techniques to improve it.

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GALANT

Future navigation services provided by upcoming satellite systems like Galileo will require corresponding improvements of the receiving systems. Particularly, interference and multipath signals may cause a significant degradation of the performance and thus make it impossible, to obtain exact and reliable positioning data. These restrictions and uncertainties cannot be tolerated for Safety-of-Life (SoL) applications e.g. in aeronautics and shipping. In order to overcome this problem, adaptively steered antenna arrays are employed, which enable the use of new beamforming and signal processing algorithms. They provide a more exact and reliable navigation solution, by suppressing interferences and multipath signals and improving the reception of the information signal from the direction of the satellite.

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Galileo SMF

The acronym Galileo SMF ist standing for Signal Monitoring Facility for Galileo FOC Phase. To the beginning of 2011 the institute was mandated to provide a measurement and analysis service in cooperation with the GSOC for the Galileo FOC satellites. Aim of the project is to provide the European Commission represented by European Space Agency and their industry partners (Thales Alenia Space) an independent possibility for measurement of the Signal-in-Space (SIS) of the Galileo satellites after their launch and the In-Orbit Test (IOT) phase.

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HEIMDALL – Multi-Hazard Cooperative Management Tool for Data Exchange, Response Planning and Scenario Building

The EU H2020 project HEIMDALL aims at enhancing the response capabilities to disasters of society as a whole. Thus 14 European partners from academia, research insitutions, industry, authorities, and emergency response organizations join forces to develop and demonstrate a modular, flexible and scalable architecture that provides key stakeholders with relevant tools to process the available data and improve preparedness of societies in relation to emergency management, thus enhancing response capacity of society as a whole. The basic element of the HEIMDALL architecture is the Integrated Service Platform (SP)/ Local Unit (Figure 1), offered to each individual authority for response planning and scenario building. Furthermore, multiple instances of the platform can be interconnected in a federated scenario to facilitate cooperation.

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Ionosphere Monitoring and Prediction Center (IMPC)

The performance of radio systems used in space based communication, navigation and remote sensing is affected by the ionospheric variability. Moreover, ionospheric disturbances caused by space weather effects may degrade the accuracy, reliability and availability of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as GPS and the future civilian European system Galileo. The Ionosphere Monitoring and Prediction Center (IMPC) of DLR provides a near real-time information and data service on the current state of the ionosphere, related forecasts and warnings.

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NEXT-OBP-GEOSat - NEXT On-Board Processing Unit für GEOSatelliten

Ziel des Projekts NEXT-OBP-GEOSat („NEXT On-Board Processing Unit für GEOSatelliten“) ist die Entwicklung und Weltraumqualifizierung einer experimentellen Satellitennutzlast, mit der sowohl die Netzcodierung, als auch Experimente zur Mehrteilnehmerdetektion und Reliable Multicast durchgeführt werden können. Ein Mitflug auf dem geostationären Heinrich-Hertz Satelliten wird angestrebt. Die Hardware der On-Board Processing Unit wird vom Projektpartner IQ wireless GmbH in Berlin entwickelt; Algorithmen und Software werden vom Institut für Kommunikation und Navigation beigesteuert. Der Entwicklungsbedarf hierfür ist praktisch eine Neuentwicklung, da die Netzcodierung für ein Übertragungsverfahren entwickelt werden muss, das eine vollständige Demodulation, Decodierung, Recodierung und Remodulation an Bord des Satelliten erlaubt.

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OSIRIS - Optical Space Infrared Downlink System

Mit den steigenden Sensorkapazitäten von modernen Erdbeobachtungssatelliten wächst der Bedarf an Datenübertragungssystemen, welche eine hohe Datenrate zur Verfügung stellen können. Insbesondere bei Kleinsatelliten („BIRD-Klasse“, ca. 50x50x50cm) hat die Kombination aus hoher Datenübertragungsrate, geringem Gewicht, niedrigem Leistungsverbrauch und kleinem Formfaktor höchste Priorität. Hierzu bieten sich miniaturisierte Laser-Sendeterminals für direkte optische Downlinks an, welche mit Antennendurchmessern von wenigen Zentimetern sehr kleine und leichte Bauformen aufweisen. Zudem unterliegt diese Übertragungstechnologie keinerlei Frequenzvergaberestriktionen.

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VaMEx-CoSMiC - Swarm exploration on Mars

The project Valles Marineris Explorer (VaMEx) – Cooperative Swarm Navigation, Mission and Control (CoSMiC) investigates innovative approaches for infrastructure-less navigation and exploration for highly automated heterogeneous robotic swarms exploring Valles Marineris on Mars. Resulting technologies are key enablers to explore the largest valley in our solar system which is possibly a refuge for extraterrestrial life.

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GeReLEO

Low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites require both data links for telemetry, tracking and command (TT&C) and for download of mission data (e.g., Earth observation). A single ground station can maintain a contact to a passing LEO satellite for relatively short time only (typically ~10 min), and together with high-resolution sensor systems onboard the satellites producing high amounts of data this leads to a serious bottleneck. In fact, depending on the actual orbit parameters (altitude and inclination) the long-term average visibility as seen from one ground station is only 1% to 6% of the overall orbit time.