Tests of Galileo’s authentication and high-accuracy open services are promising

Galileo differentiates itself from other GNSS in many ways. Besides being the only civil managed navigation system, it involves a myriad of different European stakeholders including three different European institutional players: The European Space Agency (ESA), in charge of the space and ground segments design and development; the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), which manages the service, the operational security, and the market development; and the European Commission, which oversees the whole programme.

Galileo HAS promises an accuracy of 20 cm with a 95% success rate and reliable signal authentication free-of-charge

In an interview given to Inside GNSS, Ignacio Fernández Hernández, Galileo Authentication and High Accuracy Service Manager at the European Commission, eluded on the current situation of Galileo’s Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) and High Accuracy Service (HAS).

The European Commission defined the three parts of Galileo’s Commercial Service: the Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA), used to authenticate the Galileo open service message and protecting it from attacks; the High Accuracy Service (HAS) used to provide Precise Point Positioning (PPP) within 20-centimetre accuracy; and the Commercial Authentication Service (CAS), providing signal authentication in a commercial framework.

According to Fernández, Galileo successfully transmitted the OSNMA signal between November 2020 and April 2021. The results of the testing campaign have been already analysed without finding any degradation of the navigation performance provided by the Open Service (OS).

The OSNMA signal allows Galileo to address all the new applications demanding a high level of resilience, such as autonomous driving, drones navigation, and emergency handling.

Regarding the HAS, the main challenge is the transition from an initially fee-based system to a free of charges one. Furthermore, differently from usual PPP providers, which rely on numerous monitoring stations worldwide, Galileo has to maintain a comparable level of performance using only 14 of them and therefore relying on fewer correction data. Nevertheless, Fernández confirmed that the results of the early tests conducted show an accuracy in line with the 20-cm target 95% of the times.

Learn more about HAS and check out the Galileo HAS Info Note

Learn more about OSNMA Tests underway